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?

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.

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!

Technology evolves quickly. When you first created your Rails application, it’s likely you did it using the latest version of Rails. As time passes, however, new Rails versions come out and your application becomes more and more out of touch with the latest version. But why is this important? Why does it matter?

There are several different reasons to upgrade your Rails application. In this article, I’ll list what we consider to be the most important ones.

Migrating from Protected Attributes to Strong Parameters in a Rails project can be a huge step of the upgrade process. Especially when we are upgrading a large application. This guide is meant to help you tackle that step faster and with a lot less pain.

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.

As part of our Roadmap service at FastRuby.io, we analyze the test suite of the application we are auditing to give a proper estimate on how long it will take us to upgrade. One of the tools we use for this is SimpleCov.

Often times our clients use parallelization in their continuous integration tools. SimpleCov generates multiple .resultset.json files for the same codebase. However, our goal is to have a single .resultset.json for the whole application. In this blog post we are going to show you how we solved the problem.

We recently collaborated with Amitree on a Rails upgrade for their application which “is an AI assistant for email, integrated deeply within Google and Microsoft’s products and is in heavy use by real estate professionals” and were able to speak to them about their experience with OmbuLabs.

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.

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

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.

An outdated Rails application doesn’t happen overnight. In FastRuby.io we work with a lot of clients who have outdated Rails applications and we help them upgrade to a newer Rails version. In this article I share some things that you could start doing to avoid falling out of date.

I recently wrote a spec for metric_fu which accidentally introduced a non-deterministic spec (a flaky spec!). I had no idea why it was randomly failing. This is an article to explain the process I followed to debug this issue.

In this blog post I will introduce bundler-leak – A bundler plugin to find known memory leaks in your dependencies.

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