OmbuLabs Blog

You’ve signed a contract with an agency, awesome! At this point you already know that agencies like ours offer expertise and resources that can help you overcome challenges, increase efficiency, and achieve your goals.

Now that the executives, sales team, and lawyers have signed off on the project, how do you get off to a quick start to accomplish your business goals?

This is part of our series on design sprints. If you haven’t read our previous articles, I encourage you to read more about our design sprint process.

Day 4 is a little different from the other days of the Design Sprint. Instead of a series of workshops, we will spend most of the day each working on one part of the prototype.

Towards the end of the day, we will do a test run to check on our progress and adjust from there.

In my previous post, I mentioned how I was having issues with populating my random maze. The main problem is that there isn’t a clear way to programmatically add random rooms and paths between those rooms. I ended up with a method way more complex than I wanted and that only did the most basic thing, which was to add random types of rooms and just connect them randomly as well, but without verifying any form of room placement, for example.

This is a clear sign that we need another layer of abstraction. We need something that can hold our maze data and to take care of placing the rooms and connecting them according to the rules we establish. After some research, I think I found the right alternative: the Graph.

Speaking at conferences can be a daunting task, and I am not here to deny that. But beyond that daunting task lies a bunch of benefits. Through this post, I am trying to shed light on some of those benefits and how you can make the task of speaking at a conference a little less daunting. Please continue reading if this interests you.

At OmbuLabs, we love remote work. While other companies are asking employees to come back into the office, we are continuing to lean into the remote-first work culture that we had even before the pandemic. In this article, I will discuss the reasons why remote work is essential to the culture of our company. I will then outline how we create a culture that is both remote-friendly and productive.

Design Sprints lend themselves nicely to a virtual format, and digital tools can enhance this widely-used process developed by Google Ventures.

We recently learned that a website (ph-ombulabs dot com) is impersonating our company. They are unlawfully using our branding to take advantage of people who are looking for remote work.

Day 3 is all about picking a direction and going forward with it. Over the course of the third day of the Design Sprint, we will assess which parts of our designs are most successful and create a storyboard to show the steps that our target customer might take towards achieving the goal.

Remember your sketches from Day 2? It’s time for the team to see them. The purpose of this activity is for the entire team to see each other’s work and get to pick out all the best pieces for our next activity.

So, our little exercise in design patterns is getting quite messy. Which is ironic, considering it’s an exercise in design patterns.

The reason is that I’m mostly trying to be very focused on the Design Patterns book and just fleshing out the example implementations they provide.

Therefore, in order to organize things, I believe this is the right time to add unit tests. As a plus, I also get to test my little gem in an automated fashion.

Here I’ll only go through the RandomMazeBuilder class since it would be quite lengthy to go through every single file. To see all the other specs, just checkout the repo.

As a consultancy specializing in upgrades, dealing with legacy code is our bread and butter. Incompatible versions of Ruby, different version managers, C errors while running bundle install - there are many ways that setting up projects is not always straightforward. Add to this several projects and your development machine becomes a mess of hard to diagnose issues due to mismatched system dependencies. Virtualization to the rescue!

At OmbuLabs, you are not just working with a premier software boutique when you work with us. You are collaborating with compassionate individuals, change-making innovators, and industry leaders who understand your challenges because we’ve faced them. More importantly, we know how to solve them.

Have you ever wondered what the values on the request queue graph in the APM tool meant or whether a certain value indicated good or poor performance?

The fundamentals of request queue, factors that contribute to longer request queues, and other topics will be covered in this post.

When working with complex forms, it’s really easy to immediately start adding JavaScript to implement non-common behaviors. But there are some hidden gems in the HTML standard that allow us to do a lot of that without adding a single line of JavaScript!

If I were to ask you: tell me in one word or a number here, how satisfied are your users with the response times of your application. What would you say?

I would say the apdex score is 0.98 and that’s pretty awesome. Now, if you are wondering what is this apdex score and what does the 0.98 value tell us, you have come to the right place.

Continue reading to understand this better.

Upon integrating any performance monitoring tool for your application, you must be observing p95, p99 response times on the dashboards. If you are wondering what do these terms and their values mean, you have come to the right place.