One of the drawbacks to using Ruby or Ruby on Rails in the inability to debug your code from within an integrated development environment, or IDE. For someone that is used to debugging in this way, Ruby feels like a large step back in their productivity.
My personal IDE of choice is VS Code. It’s a free IDE that was spun off of the Microsoft Visual Studio suite of tools and has really become one of the best free IDEs available today. Like many IDEs, VS Code has the ability to extend it’s core functionality using a catalog of extensions. I recently came across an extension that mentioned being able to use VS Code’s debugger with Ruby, so I dug in to figure it out.