At FastRuby.io, we talk a lot about software quality. It’s how we determine whether a client is a good fit for an upgrade. The less technical debt a codebase has, the easier it is to maintain, and the more likely a Rails upgrade will go smoothly. But what determines whether software is “good quality”? In this article, we will talk about what software quality is, and explain the metrics that people use when talking about how to measure it.

In the developers’ world, there is a well known quote by Phil Karlton that goes There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. We usually think about that phrase in the sense that it’s hard to come up with a clear, descriptive, and concise name for the code we write (variables, methods/functions, modules/classes, etc), but sometimes, the perfect name we found can be a problem too.

We, full stack Rails engineers, have come a long way. We started off as full stack engineers with our backend and frontend all in one framework. We had the asset pipeline (with sprockets) to help us maintain this ecosystem. When the time came we introduced webpacker to fill in where sprockets fell short.

In this post we will take a look at how we can take the next step on our journey by migrating from webpacker to esbuild.

At FastRuby.io, we recommend using the Dual Boot technique for upgrades. This requires us to generate a Gemfile.next.lock file that will be used to boot the app with the next version or Rails. In this article we’ll share 2 techniques to generate this file: the faster one and the safer one.

When we run tests, we don’t want to hit external services in most cases, so our tests don’t depend on external services and are more stable. We can use gems like VCR or WebMock to stub the requests that are done by the Rails application, but when the request is initiated by the JavaScript code… that’s a different story.

At OmbuLabs, one of our specialities is upgrading Ruby on Rails applications through our specialized service called FastRuby.io. In this post, I want to share with you some of the things that I’ve learned while working on my first Rails upgrade client project as a less experienced Rails developer.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 6.1 to version 7.0.

We all have been there, we work on a project and, over time, we write similar code in different ways (either by two different developers or by the same developer). We have two blocks of code that follow the same logic but look different; and we have to make an extra effort to understand them only because the code is written in a different way.

Defining a code style will prevent this, but we need a way to enforce it. In this article, we’ll show what’s our setup to use StandardRB (and RuboCop) to improve the quality of the code by keeping a consistent style to help the developers.

In modern apps, it’s common to enhance the user experience with JavaScript. Whether it’s just some JavaScript sprinkles here and there or a full JS-based frontend, this is as important as your Ruby code when it comes to the app’s correct functionality. In this article we’ll show how to measure the test code coverage for the JavaScript code when running system/integration tests along with the Ruby code coverage.

Zeitwerk is the code autoloader and reloader that was integrated with Rails 6. Beginning in Rails 7, it will be the only codeloader option. As a result, upgrading to Zeitwerk will be an important step in getting your application ready for the next version of Rails. In this article, we’ll talk about upgrading your Rails 6 application from classic to zeitwerk mode.

In case you are not familiar with us, FastRuby.io specializes in Ruby and Rails upgrades. Over these past 10 years we have had the opportunity to perform dozens of upgrades for our clients, which has given us all sorts of experiences. A common scenario that we experience is when the upgrade isn’t straightforward and we can’t just upgrade the Ruby or the Rails version directly.

We often find ourselves in a situation where we need to upgrade one or more dependencies before we can actually upgrade Ruby or Rails itself. For instance, if your want to upgrade your app from Rails 5.x to 6.x and the application still uses Paperclip to manage your file attachments, first you’ll need to replace that gem because Paperclip was deprecated in favor of Active Storage after Rails 5.2 was released.

This was the case for one of our clients that has been doing upgrades with us for a few years now. In this article I’m going to share the mishaps found by the team and the strategy that we adopted to migrate their huge volume of attachments over to Active Storage while still keeping Paperclip active until the migration was finished.

In this article we will discuss and demonstrate how we can use Ruby to encode UUIDs into URL friendly representations. This article does not assume any previous knowledge about UUIDs. Instead we will first discuss what exactly a UUID is. We look at all the reasons we would prefer using UUIDs over conventional incremental integers.

You can look forward to some binary math and adding a simple but effective encoding algorithm to your tool belt.

We are excited to share a new gem for the Ruby community: dotenv_validator! A library that will help you validate that the values in your environment are valid according to the comments in your .env.sample file.

This article is part of our Upgrade Rails series. To see more of them, click here.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you need to know to get your Ruby on Rails application from version 6.0 to 6.1.

Ruby 3.0 was released on December 25th 2020. We can now enjoy the great new features of this version, such as performance boost (we talked about that in this recent article), ractors for concurrency, fiber schedulers, and type checking.

If you already have an application running in production and want to be able to use such benefits you’ll need to upgrade your Ruby version.

This article will cover the most important aspects that you’ll need to know to get your Ruby application from version 2.7 to 3.0