OmbuLabs Blog

We launched FastRuby.io, our first productized service, back in June 2017. At the time, we had been doing Ruby on Rails upgrades since 2009, for our own products and client projects. We decided to package these upgrades under their own domain through FastRuby.io.

Now, over two years later, we have completed over a dozen Ruby on Rails upgrades through FastRuby.io and are seeing consistent interest in our upgrade and estimation services.

We decided that it was time to refresh the look and feel of the website. We worked with Verónica García, UI Designer and Front End Developer, to complete the website redesign. In this post, we talk to Verónica about her creative process and how she approached the redesign challenge.

We have been a fully remote company for a year and a half now. Making the transition to being fully remote can be challenging for any team. During the past year and a half we have worked on making sure that our team is as productive, communicative and social as it was when we had a traditional office space. Here are some tips that we have found to be useful for remote teams:

Pull Requests let developers tell other team members about changes they’ve made to a project repository. Once a pull request is created, team members can review the set of changes, discuss potential modifications and even push follow-up commits before the changes are merged into the repository. Therefore, it is important to make sure that your pull requests are easily understandable to the reviewers.

Sprint Retrospectives are a crucial part of our project management strategy at OmbuLabs. Because we are a remote and international team of software developers, we miss out on the “water-cooler” conversations and small talk that would normally occur between employees in a typical office environment.

At OmbuLabs, we like to split our time between working on our own products, open source and client projects.

Our own products include everything from OmbuShop, an e-commerce platform, to FastRuby.io, a Ruby on Rails upgrade service. In terms of open source, we recently created Audit Tool and are constantly searching for more projects to contribute to. We also work on a variety of interesting client projects, and with our current team size, like to take on two to three of them at a time.

As an Account Manager, it can get hectic trying to manage all of this. Google Calendar can be a serious help.

At OmbuLabs, we have a number of tools that help us to keep organized, write better code and communicate more effectively with our clients.

When starting a new software development project with a client, it is important to get started on the right foot. The way you communicate with a client at the beginning of a project can set the tone for how communication will be throughout the project.

Therefore, at OmbuLabs, we believe it is crucial to start off every new project with a Kickoff Call, where we can take time to get to know the client’s team and speak in depth about their goals and priorities for the project. We like to discuss the following list of topics with clients during our calls:

After reading introductory primers and watching instructional videos for beginners learning Ruby, I needed a program that would allow me to test out Ruby concepts for myself. I began practicing Ruby Koans, a testing-based program that runs through a variety of Ruby concepts in a trial and error fashion.