Ruby

Which Ruby implementation is right for your project? While the reference implementation (Ruby MRI) remains the interpreter of choice, an alternate Ruby implementation may be right for your project, depending on your operational goals and constraints. This article showcases the Ruby interpreter implementations and runtimes available today, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Rails is both easy to use—and also to misuse. Let’s look at 10 common Rails programming mistakes, explore their consequences, and discover ways to steer clear, as we write clean Ruby on Rails code.

This post explores some of the more common types of GPS tracking errors to expect with low-end GPS devices, providing an understanding of what causes them as well as some approaches for correcting them. The techniques outlined can provide users of low-end GPS devices with a reasonable level of automated improvement of the accuracy of their GPS tracks.

Elasticsearch provides a powerful, scalable tool for indexing and querying massive amounts of structured data, built on top of the Apache Lucene library. Building on the foundation of Elasticsearch and the Elasticsearch-Ruby client, we've developed and released our own improvement (and simplification) of the Elasticsearch application search architecture that also provides tighter integration with Rails. We've packaged it as a Ruby gem named Chewy. This post discusses how we accomplished this, including the technical obstacles that emerged during implementation.

Testing. It always seems to get left to the last minute, then cut because you're out of time, budget, or whatever else. Management wonders why developers can't just "get it right the first time", and developers (especially on large systems) can be taken off-guard when different stakeholders describe different parts of the system. With behavior-driven development, you can turn testing into a shared process that focuses on the behaviors of the system, why they matter, and who cares.

I've been an Engineer at Toptal for just about one year now, working on the same project since I joined the network: Ondello, a service that connects doctors and patients over WebRTC. When I first joined Ondello, I was hired as a Senior Ruby on Rails Developer, tasked to build a service up from scratch. These days, we're a team of multiple developers working on a fairly large, complex system. With this post, I'd like to share the story behind Ondello. Specifically, I'd like to talk about: how a simple application became not-so-simple, and how our use of cutting-edge technologies posed problems I'd never considered before.

Sometimes I hear people complaining about their clients, saying that they insist on using Rails, that they've had too much Kool Aid. If they are recruiters, they almost feel sick in the stomach from perspective of having to find yet another ROR primadona. From the programmers point of view it sometimes looks like clients don't have a clue. However, I believe most clients know their options just fine and they still decide to go with Rails.

Sometimes, clients give us feature requests that we really don't like. It's not that we don't like our clients, we love our clients. It's not that we don't like the feature, most client-requested features are aligned perfectly with their business goals and income. Sometimes, the reason we don't like a feature request is that the easiest way to solve it is to write bad code, and we don't have an Elegant Solution on the top of our heads. This will throw many of us on fruitless searches through RubyToolbox, github, developer blogs, and stackoverflow looking for a gem or plugin or example code that will make us feel better about ourselves. Well, I'm here to tell you, it's okay to write bad code. Sometimes, bad code is easier to refactor into beautiful code than a poorly thought out solution implemented under a time-crunch.

Starting a new remote gig, be it a contract project or a full-time job, can be a little intimidating if you're used to going into an office day after day. But this style of employment is growing in popularity, with some very notable companies lending it their endorsements. I've worked remotely for years now on projects of various scales and durations. With this post, I hope to enumerate some of the best practices that I've picked up for working in a variety of situations. The advice here ranges from specific recommendations for software and hardware to tips for hitting your team's deadlines.