In Ruby, we often want to rename methods or attributes for clarity, to extend functionality and for compatibility. However, there are three different tools for this, each with its own use case and behavior: alias, alias_method and alias_attribute.

In this post we’ll go over each one of them, what they actually do and when to use them.

For developers, segmentation faults can feel like a sudden nightmare—cryptic errors that crash your application out of nowhere. This frustration is amplified when they show up in high-level languages like Ruby, where memory management is typically handled behind the scenes. Recently, while running my Ruby application, I experienced a segmentation fault caused by a gem. The crash not only halted my program but also left me facing a daunting debugging challenge. In this post, I’ll talk about how I identified the issue, debugged it, and eventually found a solution.

The other day, I was setting up a client project when I came across this dreaded error when running bundle install:

Gem::Ext::BuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. 

Have you ever gotten this error and spent hours of your day trying to install the missing gems? In this article, learn why this error occurs and how to solve it for good.

As of August 2024, Ruby 3.4 has not been released yet, although the Ruby Core team is working on it and continues to make progress on enhancements and refinements so our ruby apps can have the best performance. In this blog post we will talk about an interesting discussion happening about the # frozen_string_literal comment at the top of Ruby files.

With the Ruby 3.3.0 release around the corner, we wanted to share a summary of the changes that are coming in this new version. There are many exciting new features and improvements!

By default, Ruby defines many constants and global variables that can be used in the code to get information about the current state of the application and the runtime. In this article we’ll go over most of them to understand what they are and what information we can set and get to simplify our scripts or to debug problems.

We are used to checking the deprecation warnings displayed by Rails or warnings from different gems, but Ruby itself can also display warnings to help us find code that can be problematic.

In this article we will explore how to use them, how to analyze them, and some examples of interesting warnings that can be really helpful during upgrades.

I’ve always wanted to create a gem that becomes popular enough to be well known and everybody speaks about it. Unfortunately, until now it has been only a dream. In the meantime, I’ve learned how to create and release gems manually and I’d like to share that with you. Maybe somehow your gem could be the next most popular gem and I’ll be super proud of that if your first step was to read this blog post.

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.

At OmbuLabs we like to follow a style guide to drive our own products. A style guide is a document that provides guidelines for the way your brand should be presented from both a graphic and language perspective. You can see FastRuby.io’s style guide at this link.

Since we have a few applications in place and it’s important to make sure that they all use the same style, we need to ensure that they will all inherit the same CSS files. One way to do this is to copy the above style guide and paste it inside all of our apps, but this would end up causing a lot of duplicated code. If we decided to change the font-style, for example, we would need to change it in all apps individually.

Something else we are super fans of at OmbuLabs is to follow good code and development practices. One of our favorites is the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle, which states that duplication in logic should be eliminated via abstraction. So to avoid the duplicated code here, we decided to create a gem to encapsulate our style guide and to be bundled in all of our products.

In this article, I’ll show you how we did it!

Today we are happy to announce the launch of our new microsite: Gemfile.lock Audit Tool - a tool created to allow users to check their Gemfile.lock for vulnerabilities in a quick and secure manner.