Posts By: Chris Mar

We love open source. We build on open source technology and we strive to give back to the community. One of our Engineers - Ken Collins - discovered a creative way to map a Lambda request to a Rack request for a Full-Stack Rails application. We open sourced the Lamby project to provide a minimal amount of code to allow your Rails project to respond to incoming Lambda events. Ken shared our story of monoliths to microservices to Lamby at...

At Custom Ink, we are always working on new technologies and love to share with the community. Ken Collins recently presented on using Ruby on Rails with Lambda at Arlington Ruby. We recorded the presentation to share. Description A progressive dive into how to use Ruby with AWS Lambda via their serverless application framework SAM to locally develop, test and ship your function to the cloud. Along the way we will cover topics on how to build native extensions, extend...

Disabling external assets like JavaScript or images can improve the performance of your Rails System Tests. Capybara is the acceptance test framework abstracted by Rails System Tests. It will load all assets on a page before proceeding to the next step in your test. Since, we are only testing interactions with Rails System Tests, we can reduce the page load time by ignoring images, external scripts and fonts. Rails 5.1 introduced SystemTestCase. It is a nice abstraction around Capybara providing...

This is an exciting time in the Ruby Community. We are welcoming many new developers from bootcamps and online code schools. We need more developers. We want to hire more developers. We want to hire you.

CustomInkTech sponsored the RubyConf 5k in San Antonio, Texas. It was a beautiful course along the famous River Walk. The results are posted below. Special thanks to Stafford for designing the race course. And running it multiple times to set up and clean up.

Each year, our engineers gather together for an internal conference we call Inkovate. This year, we started with a series of lightning talks. Topics included everything from emerging technologies to useful tool tips. We recorded the talks to share with the Ruby community. Inkovate 2015 was a huge success. After the lightning talks, our engineers spent 2 days hacking on anything they fancied. The results exceeded our expectations. Unleashed creativity brings true inkovation. We’ll share more about the projects in...

If you haven't noticed, the Bundler team has been on a tear lately. It's hard to keep up with the pace of the 1.10.x releases. Along with improvements, they have been adding features. One that you might have missed is the new bundler/inline and it's gemfile method. Bundler Inline allows you declare your gem dependencies "inline" instead of a Gemfile. This is perfect for single file scripts. Everything can be contained in a single file, no Gemfile, no bundle install,...

The Ruby Pretzel Colon is one of my favorite idioms. But it's salty goodness can be an acquired taste for new Ruby programmers. There seems to be an aversion to it's apparent magic. It is an unusual syntax. But it is easy to understand if you break it down into it's parts.

We were proud to organize and sponsor the RubyConf5k in San Diego for a second time. 75 conference attendees woke up early after a late night of Ruby karaoke for a scenic run around the marina. The camaraderie of the Ruby community was highlighted by the support the runners showed for each other. Many running a 5k for the first time. Congratulations to all the participants. Here are the official results.

A common Ruby pattern for injecting values from an Array into to a Hash is to use the Enumerable#inject method and pass the hash as the memo. If you had an enumeration of User objects, you might convert them to a hash with something like this: # build a hash of { name => email } users = User.all users.inject({}) do |memo, user| memo[user.name] = user.email memo # you must return the memo each time! end While this will reduce...

When upgrading a high-traffic Rails application from 3.0.x to 3.2.x, existing sessions with Flash data will raise dump format error during the session unmarshalling step of the users next request. For an ostensibly minor patch (see semver), breaking user sessions is an unexpected surprise and a real bummer for your users. The Rails breaking change to FlashHash was to stop inheriting from Hash: # Rails 3.0 - See: http://git.io/X8WqIw class FlashHash < Hash # Rails 3.2 - See: http://git.io/jJ_Qhw class...

Around here, we love our dashboards. They are the modern water cooler gathering spot. Inkers gather around and watch the latest T-Shirt designs and track sales across the country. We built the first dashboard as a spare time experiment, but they quickly grew into an important part of our culture.

As a rising senior at Carnegie Mellon Unviersity, Anthony joins CustomInk Tech for the summer as a development intern in the Tako Stand!

Michael has joined CustomInk and is a member of the Wildcards Fireteam. He's been focusing on our new text generation service. And will be helping us with a big upgrade on our main Rails project.

Our hipster engineers donated their upper lips to change the face of men’s health. They formed the Upper Lipsters and raised $4,202 to support men's health awareness.

Jonathan joins CustomInk from William & Mary where he studied Computer Science powered by bread ends and house dressing at the local Cheese Shop. He joins the Ironborn Industries fireteam.

What happens when you challenge a group of engineers to a costume contest? They go BIG. CustomInk has a spirit of creativity and inkers approach the art Halloween Costuming very seriously. All of our e-commerce fireteams joined together to recreate Toy Story.