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January 23, 2026 Raster maps, GeoJSON overlays, and real-world cartography — without leaving Ruby. Over the last months, I’ve been working on libgd-gis, a GIS rendering engine built on top of libgd and designed specifically for Ruby developers who need static map generation without relying on browser-based toolchains or heavyweight GIS stacks. This article walks … Continue reading libgd-gis: A Practical GIS Rendering Engine for Ruby
January 22, 2026 libgd-gis, satellite imagery, and a new way to think about maps Most mapping libraries start from the same place: roads, labels, vectors, tiles. But what happens if the map itself is not the goal? What if the map is just a lens to observe the planet? This article is about how libgd-gis, … Continue reading A New View of Earth, Powered by Ruby
January 21, 2026 Distributing images securely is a recurring challenge in modern web applications. Whether for previews, confidential documents, or paid content, developers often need to ensure that images are not reused, hotlinked, or accessed indefinitely. Imprint is a Ruby gem that addresses this problem by providing signed, time-limited image rendering with dynamic watermarks, allowing … Continue reading Imprint: Signed, Expiring Image Rendering with Dynamic Watermarks in Ruby
For years, maps in Rails applications have lived almost entirely on the frontend:JavaScript libraries, external APIs, keys, variable costs, and a fair amount of friction. map_view starts from a simple question: What if maps in Rails were as simple as rendering a view? <%= map_for @locations %> That’s it. What is map_view? map_view is a … Continue reading map_view — Server-side maps for Ruby on Rails
January 16, 2026 Testing GIS animations in Ruby (exploratory work) Today, early in the morning, after releasing GIF and animation support in ruby-libgd, together with updated documentation, versioning, and examples, I decided to do something very concrete: spend the entire day stress-testing the alpha version of libgd-gis. And what better way to test animations than … Continue reading libgd-gis v0.2.7.pre.alpha.1
Ruby Now Has an Animated Map Engine January 15, 2026 Building real-time, animated maps in pure Ruby — no JavaScript required. A new class of maps for Ruby Over the past weeks, we’ve been extending ruby-libgd and libgd-gis far beyond static image rendering. What started as a raster + GIS toolkit is now evolving into … Continue reading Ruby Now Has an Animated Map Engine (Alpha Preview)
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
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
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
Inside DENTIS, the cloud dental platform built by Medley, Inc. In 2025, at RubyWorld Conference, Toshio Maki — Engineering Manager and Head of the Dental Clinic Business Unit at Medley, Inc. — presented one of the most impressive real-world applications of Ruby in modern healthcare p30-2. The talk, titled: “Ruby powering Dental DX – Development … Continue reading How Ruby Powers One of the Most Complex Healthcare Systems in the World
Linking Ruby knowledge from the most remote places in the world. 