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