Articles by Ernesto Tagwerker

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ReadyTech Accelerates Revenue Growth, Cuts Infrastructure Costs 5-10% with Ruby on Rails Upgrade

Based in Sydney, Australia, ReadyTech combines technology with a people-centric approach to help organisations navigate complexity and deliver meaningful outcomes. With more than 500 employees globally, the publicly-traded company continues to grow rapidly and now serves 4,000+ customers across three vertical segments: Education & Work Pathways, Workforce Solutions, and Government & Justice.

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How and Why to Measure Dependency Freshness in your Ruby Application

Whether you are working in a legacy Ruby application, or a brand new application, measuring your dependency freshness score can be a positive indicator to understand whether you are staying current or gradually falling out of date.

Dependency freshness is defined as the difference between the currently used version of a dependency and the version that the system would ideally use.

In this article, I will discuss a couple of ways to keep track of how outdated or how fresh your dependencies really are.

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Fortify Rails - Defending Your Ruby on Rails Applications from Bad Actors

On Monday June 12th, 2023, FastRuby.io partnered with Expedited Security to talk about how to secure your Ruby on Rails application.

In this free webinar Ernesto Tagwerker (FastRuby.io) and Mike Buckbee (Expedited Security) discussed topics of interest related to Rails security (exploitable ActiveRecord code, vulnerable dependencies, botnets, DDoS, a breakdown of common threats, and more).

You’ll also get a sneak peak of Wafris, an Open Source service to prevent attackers and dark traffic to your application and of our new Rails Security Audit, a service to detect vulnerabilities and exploitable code in your app!

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Bonsai - Fixed-cost, Monthly Maintenance Service

Ever since we started offering productized Ruby and Rails upgrade services and upgrade roadmaps, we’ve been interested in helping as many people and companies as possible.

Unfortunately, in the past we’ve had to turn down companies who wanted to work with us but couldn’t secure the minimum monthly budget to work with our experts.

I’m pleased to announce that we’re now offering new opportunities for startups and small businesses to work alongside our team.

In this article, I will share a few new options to collaborate with our team of experts who specialize in technical debt remediation.

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Power Home Remodeling Increases Server Speed by 40% with FastRuby.io's Tune Report

Power Home Remodeling (Power) is the nation’s largest full-service exterior home remodeler and a top workplace.

Headquartered in Chester, Pennsylvania with offices in 18 territories across the United States, the award-winning company’s primary product line includes windows, siding, doors, roofing, solar roofing panels, and attic insulation.

In this article we will share how our Tune Report helped Power speed up their application by reducing their average page load time from 5 to 3 seconds.

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4 Essential Security Tools To Level Up Your Rails Security

At FastRuby.io we love Ruby on Rails because it is so powerful: You can quickly create an application that is feature complete, stable, and secure

Unfortunately, maintaining a Rails application up to date and secure takes some effort.

In this blog post, we will cover a few Ruby gems and best practices that you can use to stay on top of your security, reliability, and stability needs.

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How to Upgrade Rails Without a Test Suite

Sometimes you will be caught between a rock and a hard place. For example: You really need to upgrade your Rails application because Heroku is discontinuing your stack in two weeks so you don’t have the time to write an entire test suite.

Sometimes the situation will be that your boss really needs you to upgrade Ruby or Rails to use a version that gets security updates and they won’t allow you to write tests beforehand.

This article will explain how to ship a Rails upgrade project without a test suite. If your application has no tests, you will learn how to upgrade without having to write tests first.

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How We Estimate The Size of a Rails Application

When inheriting a project or starting an upgrade, it is useful to understand how big and complex the application really is. So, what is a good way to understand whether a Rails application is tiny, medium, or huge?

The good news is that there are a couple of gems that make this easy for us.

In this article I will explain how you can use these gems to begin to understand the size and complexity of a Rails application.

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What are the Code Coverage Metrics for Ruby on Rails?

At FastRuby.io we are constantly looking at code coverage metrics for Ruby on Rails applications. It’s a key indicator for us. We even use that information to decide whether we work on a Rails upgrade project or not.

So, I was interested in seeing code coverage metrics for the Ruby on Rails framework. I couldn’t find any information about this online, so I decided to generate a few reports for each component.

This is an article about my process and my findings.

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Churn vs. Complexity vs. Code Coverage

Churn vs. Complexity analysis is a great way to find insights about the maintainability of a project. Two of my favorite authors have written great articles about the Churn vs. Complexity graph:

This two-dimensional graph can be very useful in finding the files that are the hardest to maintain in your application. In this article I will explain:

  1. How you can calculate these metrics and use them in your legacy project
  2. How code coverage metrics can guide your technical debt’s collection efforts
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Our Guide for Unmaintained Open Source Projects

There are some really great guides for starting a new open source projects, yet when it comes to dealing with a possibly abandoned, unmaintained project, there is no definitive guide for users, contributors, or maintainers.

I hope that this can be a useful guide for our community.

Problem

When do you declare that an open source project has been abandoned? How many days have to go by until you start maintaining your own fork? What’s the standard for communicating with maintainers, contributors, and users? How do you avoid n competing OSS forks of popular projects? How do you avoid duplicated work by people who want to maintain popular, but unmaintained OSS projects? What’s the best way to find that one fork everybody is using?

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How to Calculate Tech Debt Using Skunk on GitHub Actions

Right before my talk at RubyConf Australia, I worked on a way to make it easy for anyone to run skunk in their Ruby projects. In order to do that I decided to use GitHub Actions. It’s a powerful service by GitHub and it’s quite easy to set up.

This article is about the process that I followed and how you can use it in your own application.

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Escaping The Tar Pit: Introducing Skunk v0.3.2 at RubyConf 2019

This year I had the honor to speak at RubyConf in Nashville. It was my second time attending the conference and first time as a speaker. I talked about skunk, a gem to calculate the SkunkScore of a module or set of modules.

Since its inception, skunk has changed quite a bit based on real usage in our productized service for Rails upgrades. As a matter of fact, the night before my talk I realized there was a BIG error in our formula.

Here is a description of the problem and solution.

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Introducing Skunk: Combine Code Quality and Coverage to Calculate Your Project's SkunkScore

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak at Solidus Conf 2019. I presented Escaping the Tar Pit for the first time and I got to talk about a few metrics that we can use to quickly assess code quality in any Ruby project.

In this article I’d like to talk about Skunk: A SkunkScore Calculator! I’ll explain why we need it, how it works, and the roadmap for this new tool.

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RubyCritic v4.2.0: Now with SimpleCov Support

Every time we evaluate a new project we follow a well-defined process to decide whether we take it or not. We analyze its dependencies; its code coverage; and its code quality to determine the amount of tech debt in a project. We have been using CodeClimate to assess code quality and SimpleCov to assess code coverage.

In my previous article I wrote about free and open source Ruby gems we can use to assess code quality for any Ruby or Rails project. After writing that article, I found that RubyCritic was really interesting and its community quite active, so I thought it was a good idea to add SimpleCov support to it: https://github.com/whitesmith/rubycritic/pull/319

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Three Awesome Libraries to Assess Code Quality in Ruby

As part of our Rails upgrade business we get to evaluate a lot of codebases every month. We usually need a quick way to assess the quality of the code we get. For this we like to use CodeClimate and SimpleCov.

CodeClimate is free for open source projects and paid for private projects. I know that not everybody can pay for their service, so I thought it was a good idea to share some free, open source alternatives.

Here is a list of 3 tools that can help you assess the quality of your next codebase.

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How to Upgrade Any Rails Application Using Docker

Every time we start a new Rails upgrade project, we need to setup a whole new environment in our local machines. Sometimes that leads us down the rabbit hole which ends up breaking our environment for other client projects.

After years upgrading Rails applications, we learned that the best way to isolate our client projects’ environments is using Docker.

That’s why we decided to use Docker and docker-compose for all of our client projects. This year I had the opportunity to share our process in a series of workshops: Upgrade Rails 101: The Roadmap to Smooth Upgrades

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Legacy Rails: Silently Judging You

I had to come up with a clever title because this article is about legacy Rails applications and I know that you might fall asleep by the third paragraph. Boooooring… You probably want to read about that new JavaScript framework that came out (I love that this sentence will always be true, it doesn’t matter when you read this)

If you have been working with Rails for a few years, you have seen your fair share of shiny new applications, well-maintained and poorly-maintained legacy applications. This post is about Legacy Rails applications

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Tips for Writing Fast Rails: Part 1

Rails is a powerful framework. You can write a lot of features in a short period of time. In the process you can easily write code that performs poorly.

At OmbuLabs we like to maintain Ruby on Rails applications. In the process of maintaining them, adding features and fixing bugs, we like to improve the code and its performance (because we are good boy scouts!)

Here are some tips based on our experience.

Prefer where instead of select

When you are performing a lot of calculations, you should load as little as possible into memory. Always prefer a SQL query vs. an object’s method call.

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