Making Maps with Ruby

Making Maps with Ruby January 29, 2026 Static and animated cartography built directly from GeoJSON For a long time, generating maps from code meant working inside heavy ecosystems designed primarily for analysis. Those tools are powerful, but they are not always the right fit. In many practical scenarios, the problem is simpler and more concrete: … Continue reading Making Maps with Ruby

Ruby Rendering Seismic Observation Data

January 27, 2026 From Disaster Prevention to High-Performance Maps On December 26, 2025, I published an article titled β€œRuby at the Front Line of Disaster Prevention.” It was inspired by a real, uncomfortable fact: Tokyo Gas uses Ruby to protect millions of people during earthquakes. Not in theory. Not as a prototype. In production. That … Continue reading Ruby Rendering Seismic Observation Data

Now Ruby GIS Rendering: Stabilizing the libgd-gis Rendering API

Stabilizing the libgd-gis Rendering API January 19, 2026 This article documents the current state of libgd-gis following a significant internal update: the stabilization and freeze of its core rendering API. The update consolidates the project’s primary responsibilitiesβ€”static GIS rendering, layered composition, and post-render image manipulationβ€”into a stable and documented surface. Alongside this milestone, comprehensive documentation … Continue reading Now Ruby GIS Rendering: Stabilizing the libgd-gis Rendering API

libgd-gis continues to grow β€” now with styles and more

January 12, 2026 Real-world cartography in pure Ruby RubyStackNews β€” 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 β€” directly from Ruby. With … Continue reading libgd-gis continues to grow β€” 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

Ruby Can Now Draw Maps β€” 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 β€” 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 β€” And I Started With Ice Cream

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

How RIZAP Technologies Turns Junior Developers Into Senior Ruby Engineers

How RIZAP Technologies Turns Junior Developers Into Senior Ruby Engineers December 29, 2025 At RubyWorld Conference 2025 and Kaigi on Rails 2025, a talk by Tomohiro Umeda from RIZAP Technologies quietly delivered one of the most important messages for the future of Ruby engineering. Most companies would love to hire senior engineers. But in reality … Continue reading How RIZAP Technologies Turns Junior Developers Into Senior Ruby Engineers

Running Ruby 4 with Ruby::BOX inside Docker (Alpine)

Ruby 4 with Ruby::BOX December 24, 2025 Ruby 4 introduces one of the most important runtime features in the history of the language: Ruby::BOX. It allows Ruby to execute multiple isolated class worlds inside the same process, finally making it possible to load conflicting libraries, plugins, and user code safely. In this guide we will … Continue reading Running Ruby 4 with Ruby::BOX inside Docker (Alpine)