RoR Development

Legacy Ruby on Rails applications keep critical business operations running for many companies worldwide. While these older systems present real maintenance challenges, replacing them isn't always practical or cost-effective.

Discover the vital aspects of maintaining your Ruby on Rails application to ensure security, performance, and scalability for your growing business.

Brighton Ruby 2024 was nothing short of amazing. It brought together passionate Ruby developers from around the world to share knowledge, network, and have fun.

Creating a Ruby on Rails app can be a challenging task, but it can be made easier by utilizing different gems. These gems consist of third-party code libraries that can significantly speed up the development process. While some of these gems are necessary for Rails,…

Managing your applications’ codebase can be complex, but it doesn’t have to be daunting.  At Bit Zesty, our hands-on experience in maintaining JavaScript, React Native, Ruby on Rails, and Python apps for our clients has led us to develop a set of effective strategies.  Below,…

In the modern world, where data is crucial for businesses and organisations, having efficient search and filtering capabilities is essential. Although traditional relational databases are effective in sorting through data, their limitations in handling large-scale search operations have led to the d

At Bit Zesty, we’re always looking for ways to improve the performance of our clients’ Ruby on Rails applications. Recently, we had the opportunity to help a client optimise their Rails app, and we managed to reduce their site load time by half for some…

We take a look at the five things you need to know about the latest version of Ruby on Rails, version 6.

While many busy companies may be tempted to prioritise other needs over upgrading software, there is a strong business case for updating your Ruby on Rails application to save costs in the long term. We’ve seen it ourselves. Sometimes when we help our clients upgrade…

Background Founded in 1943, Concordia is a charity that supports people to develop skills and gain experiences so that they can thrive. One of their core services is the Seasonal Workers Programme. The programme aims to support the UK farming industry through the supply of…

Here at Bit Zesty, we love Ruby on Rails. With over 1.5 million websites currently using this full-stack, open-source framework, it seems like we’re not the only ones.  Many of the internet’s most prominent names use Ruby on Rails, and chances are you’ll be using…

The week starting Monday 17th September was #nationalcodingweek for 2018 – a week-long celebration and promotion of the skills and careers available in coding. As part of the celebration, we asked our team of senior developers to tell us what they love about developing projects…

When your development team has designed and built a new Ruby on Rails application, and it’s working as expected, it might seem like the project is completed. However, effective support and maintenance of a new digital product are just as vital as a perfect initial…

Ruby on Rails (RoR) is our technology of choice here, at Bit Zesty. We believe it is one of the best development frameworks for building web applications. And we are not alone, Airbnb, Zendesk and GOV.UK share our views. The best things about RoR are…

Without knowing it, millions of people around the world rely on Ruby, and Rails, our technologies of choice – from streaming video games, to finding holiday accommodation and listening to their favourite music. In this blog post, we will mention some of the most famous…

In the 90s, a Japanese developer called Yukihiro Matsumoto – after struggling to find a programming language that was both powerful and easy to use – decided instead to create his own. Ruby was born. It was first released publicly in 1995, however didn’t gather…

“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over Processes and tools Working software over Comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over Contract negotiation Responding to

Since its release in 2004, Ruby on Rails has earned the devotion of some of the tech industry’s most talented programmers, becoming the go-to framework for advocates of clean and rapid web development thanks to its numerous technical strengths. However how will choosing Ruby on…

Some clients ask us why we choose to use Ruby on Rails to develop web applications instead of all the other web frameworks and languages. There are many reasons for our decision, but before I embark on a discussion of the advantages (and disadvantages) of…

When working on Ruby on Rails apps, slow auto-tests can be the bane of the developer’s life. For complex applications, the test suite can take up to ten seconds to load up the entire Rails stack. This may not sound much, but it soon adds…

We often see clients trying to deal with the combination of long feature lists and limited budgets. One way to overcome this issue is by building and releasing the application in stages. This method provides the additional advantage of allowing you to get user feedback…

In Ruby there are a number of ways you can access the value of a key within a hash. The most commonly used is the square brackets syntax hash[:key]. However, there is an alternative, which is to use Hash#fetch e.g. hash.fetch(:key). In this post, we’re…

Last Thursday, Matthew gave a talk to the students of Makers Academy about some of the lessons we learned building the Trade Tariff for HMRC & GDS. Makers Academy, a training institution based in London, runs a high-intensity web application development course, where the students…

Though the number of Ruby on Rails developers is rising, many may lack the level of experience that we require. Therefore, it is necessary to implement a strong hiring practice to identify the best candidate for a role, and ensure that new recruits are not…

Most of us know that documentation is a fundamental part of any software project, but we’ve also learned through experience that producing too much documentation of the wrong kind can be a waste of time. The aim of rapid development is to minimize waste and…

While building our company dashboard, which was mentioned in our previous blog post on SVG with Raphael, I came across a problem with the project management tool we use – Pivotal Tracker. The Pivotal Tracker API is only in XML, which means you can’t do…

Whilst searching for a gem/plug-in to help with storing encrypted notes in a Rails app, I came across strongbox. It uses public key encryption to encrypt and store data on an ActiveRecord attribute – Spike has a great writeup on his blog. One limitation I…

I gave a talk at NoSQL EU on a few of the different types of NoSQL solutions we’ve used in the past, explaining why we’d chosen each one and how they had worked for us. It was a bit tough to do with a cold,…

We recently built a Ruby on Rails application that was receiving a large amount of XML. This as you can imagine was pretty CPU intensive, especially as Rails (ActiveSupport) uses REXML under the bonnet to parse the incoming requests. I started to wonder if it…

Last week I gave a talk at Google OSJam on Raphaël, a javascript SVG library that makes it easy to draw and animate vector graphics on a browser. SVG is one of the many methods of drawing images on the web. Some of the other…

I’m sure we’ve all heard the pros & cons of the NoSQL movement so these will not be covered here. I’ve been experimenting with a number of alternatives to RDBMS for a while such as CouchDB, TokyoCabinet, Redis and recently MongoDB. MongoDB (from “humongous”) is…

I am quite excited about the rising popularity of document stores. We have been using MongoDB and CouchDB for some time now, both for internal and client projects. Both databases are similar (although built on different technologies) as they are schema-free, scalable, and document-oriented. The…