ruby-libgd v0.2.2 — Text & Layout Foundations for Ruby Graphics

Text & Layout Foundations for Ruby Graphics January 14, 2026 The biggest limitation of most Ruby image libraries is not pixels — it’s text. Fonts, labels, positioning, alignment, rotation, and layout are what separate a toy renderer from a real graphics engine. Until now, ruby-libgd only exposed a very minimal wrapper around FreeType. It worked, … Continue reading ruby-libgd v0.2.2 — Text & Layout Foundations for Ruby Graphics

libgd-gis moves into serious cartography territory

January 13, 2026 Rivers of Europe and Entre Ríos rendered directly in Ruby Today marks a major milestone for libgd-gis: we crossed from “experimental map renderer” into a real GIS-grade drawing engine. Using nothing but Ruby + libgd, we are now able to render continent-scale river networks, provincial hydrology, and complex GeoJSON layers with proper … Continue reading libgd-gis moves into serious cartography territory

libgd-gis continues to grow — now with styles and more

January 12, 2026 Real-world cartography in pure Ruby RubyStackNews — January 2026 From geometry to cities Until recently, libgd-gis could render raw GeoJSON. Now it renders cities. Over the last development cycle, libgd-gis evolved from a low-level geometry renderer into a style-aware, layered GIS engine capable of producing publication-quality maps — directly from Ruby. With … Continue reading libgd-gis continues to grow — now with styles and more

Ruby Can Draw Cities Now

January 9, 2026 How I built a pure-Ruby GIS engine that renders Paris, Tokyo, New York, and more Most people don’t think of Ruby when they think about maps, GIS, or visual computing. If you want to draw a real city, the standard stack usually looks like: QGIS PostGIS Mapnik Mapbox or a heavy JavaScript … Continue reading Ruby Can Draw Cities Now

Some fresh Ruby GIS gossip

January 8, 2026 I’ve been quietly working on two Ruby libraries that are starting to click together in a really interesting way: libgd-gis — the GIS brain: maps, basemaps, lines, polygons ruby-libgd — the raster engine: pixels, alpha, image scaling, compositing Over the last days I added: lines, polygons and basemap switching to libgd-gis (0.1.3) … Continue reading Some fresh Ruby GIS gossip

Ruby Can Now Draw Maps — And I Started With Ice Cream

January 7, 2026 How libgd-gis turns Ruby into a real GIS engine For many years, Ruby quietly missed something important. Yes, Ruby is amazing at APIs, data processing, background jobs, and web platforms — but when it came to maps, graphics, and spatial data, Ruby was forced to step aside and let other languages do … Continue reading Ruby Can Now Draw Maps — And I Started With Ice Cream

Ruby just got a real sepia filter

January 6, 2026 Why ruby-libgd is becoming Ruby’s new graphics engine Yesterday something important happened in the Ruby ecosystem. I added a native sepia filter to ruby-libgd — Ruby’s new binding to the GD Graphics Library — and with it Ruby took another step toward regaining something it quietly lost over the last decade: a … Continue reading Ruby just got a real sepia filter

Ruby Can Create Images Again

January 5, 2026 How ruby-libgd brings a real raster engine back to Ruby For many years, Ruby quietly lost something fundamental: The ability to generate images natively, fast, and with full control. Yes, RMagick and MiniMagick exist. But they depend on external binaries, are slow, fragile in production, and unsuitable for things like: map tile … Continue reading Ruby Can Create Images Again

Rebuilding Ruby’s Image Processing Layer: Why ruby-libgd Matters for GIS and the Future of Ruby

Ruby on Rails Developer | Ruby, Backend January 2, 2026 In late 2025, during a RubyConf presentation about disaster-response systems, an uncomfortable truth was stated publicly: Generating map tiles and images on the server is difficult in Ruby. RMagick and MiniMagick were too slow. ruby-gd is used, but it is poorly maintained. This was not … Continue reading Rebuilding Ruby’s Image Processing Layer: Why ruby-libgd Matters for GIS and the Future of Ruby

Building a Securities Brokerage with Ruby and Go

December 31, 2025 How Bloomo built a regulated trading system from scratch By Satoshi Kobayashi (noel), CTO – Bloomo Securities RubyWorld Conference 2025 – Day 1 Introduction At RubyWorld Conference 2025, Satoshi Kobayashi (小林悟史 / noel), CTO of Bloomo Securities Inc., delivered one of the most consequential Ruby case studies in recent years: “Building a … Continue reading Building a Securities Brokerage with Ruby and Go