OmbuLabs

Skunk is an open source Ruby gem that we created which combines code quality metrics from Reek; Flay; Flog; and SimpleCov to calculate a SkunkScore for a file or set of files.

The SkunkScore is a value that assesses the technical debt of a module. It takes into account:

- Code Complexity

- Code Smells

- Code Coverage

The main goal of the SkunkScore is to serve as a compass in your next refactoring adventure. It will help you answer these questions:

- What can I do to pay off technical debt?

- What are the most complicated files with the least code coverage?

- What are good candidates for your next test-writing efforts?

- What are good candidates for your next refactoring efforts?

Background

In June of 2020, Snap launched Snap Minis: third-party, bite-size, HTML-based miniature utilities built for friends within Snapchat. Since 2016, the company has invested in native-to-mobile civic experiences to encourage political engagement among its users. As part of the next step in Snap’s civic-focused journey, the search began for an external developer with experience building Snap Minis. Snap approached OmbuLabs to build a new civic engagement app, the “Run for Office Mini”. 

Here was our challenge:

Snapchat needed a partner that would be a core part of the team and deliver on its vision. Our goal was to deliver the best user experience, ensure top performance, maintain a native look and feel with cross-browser functionality, and integrate with Snapchat’s sharing feature to incentivize users to share the Mini with friends. In addition, we would need to to pull in complex election data from a third-party API.

Here’s how we solved it:

We worked with Snap’s product, design, engineering, and public policy team, as well as BallotReady. By leveraging BallotReady’s CivicEngine API, we built the Mini to help users find local elections they can run in based on issues they care most about, nominate friends to run for local office, and connect with nonprofit organizations that will support them with next steps. This led to the successful, on-time launch of the Mini on October 5, 2021.

See the results:

Since launching, Snapchat has helped tens of thousands of Snapchatters nominate their friends to run for local office, and millions more deepened their civic knowledge. According to Axios, the Run for Office Mini reached nearly four million Snapchatters, and raised their engagement. As of October 10th, 2021, almost 4 million Snapchatters have used the Run for Office Mini since its launch and over 46,000 Snapchatters have nominated a friend to run for office.

OmbuShop is leading the eCommerce revolution in Latin America! Its simple and user-friendly platform lets anyone create an online store in just a few clicks. No software to download, no programming required.

OmbuShop helps businesses and web designers to easily build beautiful online stores that simply sell more.

BACKGROUND

Founded in 2007, SoundCloud is the world’s largest music and audio platform. It is used by music and audio creators to share and monetize their content with a global audience, as well as to receive detailed stats and feedback from the community.

HERE WAS OUR CHALLENGE:

As part of the continual improvement process, a decision was made to update an internal portion of their application to enhance security and modernize the code. SoundCloud’s IT team is focused on bringing value in the form of features for its users and didn’t have the time or capacity to tackle the upgrade.  After a few technical conversations, we were brought on board to upgrade the application. 

Our challenge was to seamlessly upgrade the company’s brittle and outdated Ruby and Rails versions while ensuring there would be zero disruptions to internal business processes.

HERE’S HOW WE SOLVED IT:

The project involved two phases, beginning with an initial four-week engagement. The first priority was to upgrade the application to fully supported software versions and install security patches. We met with the SoundCloud team, gathered insights into the code base, and gleaned valuable intel for each step in the upgrade curve. Then, we provided a written roadmap to guide the implementation process. Once it was determined that the security patches were up to date, the next step was to upgrade Ruby and Rails to more modern versions.

SEE THE RESULTS:

Within eight months, both phases were successfully completed with zero disruptions or outages during the rollout process. 

As a result of the upgrade, there were a multitude of benefits, including:

Airtight security and privacy with up-to-date patches and versions

Increased memory capacity by 25%

More efficient use of resources, fewer application servers required

Lower costs for cloud and on-premises infrastructure

Reduced start-up time impact

Easier to scale up or down

Improved CPU speed and heightened Kubernetes performance

Power Home Remodeling needed a Rails upgrade for their self-described “monolith CRM/ERP application.” 

According to them, their monolithic CRM/ERP application is continuously built by a team of approximately 50 developers, system administrators, testers and support staff. The application contains over 500,000 lines of Ruby on Rails and Javascript code, and by their own definition, is one of the most complex Rails applications out there in terms of scope.

Like many companies, Power Home Remodeling was having difficulty allocating developer attention to the Rails upgrade project due to the demands of feature work coming from other areas of the business. That is why they decided to come to OmbuLabs for help.

OmbuLabs executed a full upgrade of the application from Rails 4.0 to 5.1 and prepared the company for an eventual 5.2 upgrade. This necessary upgrade of their application led to a “reduction of risk in terms of repeat bugfix/feature development work compared to what is available in a more modern stack”.

According to Ben Klang, VP of Business Technology, “OmbuLabs augmented our in-house team with a specific capacity for the upgrade project, enabling our other developers to retain focus on direct business goals.” OmbuLabs’ exclusive focus on the Rails upgrade allowed the developers at Power Home Remodeling to continue their work on features and other goals without distractions. In the end, Power Home Remodeling received an application with up-to-date Rails versions and was able to make progress on their other work as well.

We recently spoke with Ryan Findley, Principal at Neomind Labs. We worked with his team to execute a Rails upgrade from 2.3 to 4.2 on one of their applications.

Ernesto: Thank you for taking the time to talk to us. To start out, what did you like about our Rails upgrade process?

Ryan: Big picture, it was great that you guys handled the upgrade. Doing something like this in-house, there can be a lot of back and forth, especially when you are dealing with upgrading an old version of Rails. There can be a lot of “what should we do in this case” and “what should we replace this code with”, and these decisions can take a lot of time.

Ernesto: Definitely. The experience of having done so many Rails upgrades in the past gives us a clearer path to follow for each version we upgrade. I think these decisions are more familiar to us and this lets us work more efficiently.

Ryan: Yes, the great thing for me was that you guys made those decisions. You checked in with us when, for example, there was a case with more than one option. You recommended the option you thought was best but left the final say to our team. It was great to feel like you guys had done your research and had an opinion, and in most cases your opinion matched ours. It made the process easy.

Ernesto: Great. Now in terms of responsiveness, did you think that our communication during the project was successful or is there something you would have done differently?

Ryan: I was pretty happy with communication, we generally used Slack. The project didn’t have a hard deadline in place, and the project ended up taking a bit more time than anticipated. You mentioned to us that the project would run late, which was super helpful and we appreciated that your team was managing deadlines and keeping us informed. It gave me confidence that you were proactive and communicating.

We recently collaborated with Procore on a Rails upgrade for their Rails application which allows teams in the construction industry to connect their entire business process.

We spoke with Andy Maltun, Procore’s VP of Software Engineering, about the work performed to help them upgrade their app to version 5.1. According to Maltun, Procore’s R&D department is large and complex. While Procore previously had handled their Rails upgrades internally, with so many teams working on the application, it caused a lot of disruption as each team would handle only part of the upgrade. Therefore, Maltun “wanted to take a different approach this time in an effort to centralize the update and minimize the project management overhead and disruption of teams.”

Initially, Procore reached out to OmbuLabs to discuss how the teams could work together on this project. At that point, an initial 4-week engagement was discussed with the goal of addressing various issues in Procore’s Rails 5.1 branch. This initial engagement also served the purpose of seeing if the OmbuLabs team would be able to easily plug into Procore’s team. According to Maltun “OmbuLabs proved more than up to the challenge in terms of technical ability and being a wonderful partner to collaborate with. They were not only capable but flexible in being open to our existing processes and tooling.”

With the success of the initial engagement, OmbuLabs renewed its partnership with Procore and continued to work on Procore’s Rails upgrade project for another 5 weeks. During this time, we helped move the project along and added value by moving Procore’s application closer to the next Rails version while causing minimal disruption to their internal teams and regular operation.

On a final note, Maltun stated that “this project was an unmitigated success” and we hope to be able to work with OmbuLabs again on future Rails upgrades.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to talk to Preston St. Pierre, CTO of Predictable Revenue. We worked with Preston and his team for 2 years to help them scale their software development.

Ernesto: What was the main problem you were having when you hired us?

Preston: I the main problem was lack of developer hours. We needed somebody that was flexible, on time, that we could hire for more hours or less hours if we had the budget. But the part that we didn't realize that we needed was that there was no real structure to our development. We'd discuss the problem, decide what to do, and that was kind of it. You gave us a number of processes and principles that we used to start our growth towards a more traditional organization for engineering.

Ernesto: That's great to hear. And how did that impact the business for Predictable Revenue?

Preston: OmbuLabs was a significant part of our development team for over two years. You guys were a core part of our team, and therefore you helped shape our product. I definitely would say that your expertise brought a lot to the table and that it positively influenced our system architecture. For example, using Amazon's SQS to communicate with our sender nodes via message queues; we might have went that way otherwise, but that was your idea. We're using it now because of you.

Ernesto: You said a little bit about the value we added to the team. Anything in particular that you valued from working with us?

Preston: We work with many contractors, but the thing that set the really good ones apart was how they, instead of just doing the job they were told to do, would actually figure out what we needed and try to find ways to solve our problems as though they were part of the team. And that's exactly what you guys did. Whereas bad contractors would only give us what we asked for. But you took the initiative to figure out where there were problems, where updates/maintenance were needed, then went out and did the work. That was very useful.