Let’s talk tools
In a recent workshop, we were talking about our toolchains, recommending tools to one another that we couldn't live without. We shared them with the rest of the engineering team and they gave further suggestions of their setups. I've collected them all together so you can find your new favourite tool and increase your productivity! Let's get into it. Browser Extensions Octotree is a browser plugin that gives you a… Continue reading
Rails Girls London 2019: A fun weekend of coding
Fast becoming my favourite event of the year is Rails Girls London. Every event is different as you get to spend it with a whole new group of interesting people from a huge variety of industries and backgrounds. This year we headed to the offices of Simply Business in the City of London for the one-and-a-half day workshop, and happily with FreeAgent sponsoring for the first time. Between the pool… Continue reading
Head In The Clouds
Seven years ago we started planning our first major infrastructure migration. Nine months later we made the move, taking FreeAgent from our first home in Rackspace London to a new, co-located home in two data centres (DCs) run by The Bunker. FreeAgent has been happily humming along in Ash and Greenham Common ever since. Co-locating has been a terrific win for us over the years, providing us with a cost-effective,… Continue reading
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How To Write A Good Bug Report
Hi there! My name is Dave and, as a Support Engineer at FreeAgent, I spend a lot of my time talking to our customers, our support agents and our software developers about the behaviour (and occasional misbehaviour) of our product. Fixing a product issue is an incredible opportunity to delight your users and show that, when push comes to shove, you stand by your service and your customers. During my… Continue reading
To Error, or Not to Error, that is the Question
Setting the scene You’ve got a great new feature - you’ve spent days and months testing and producing it and it’s ready. You’re ready to deploy, turn on the feature switch and GO GO GO. You know people are going to love it - and you’ve thought of all the possible issues that could arise. But disaster strikes - you’re throwing exceptions and things don’t seem to be working the… Continue reading
How we make architectural decisions
"Change is the only constant in life."—Heraclitus The software we build at FreeAgent is constantly changing and evolving. The requirements of our software can change for a wide variety of reasons, including: scalability concerns, changes to the law or organisational changes. It’s impossible to list all the reasons why your software might have to change, but it’s crucial to acknowledge that it WILL change. In order to clearly communicate the… Continue reading
From Computer Science student to Software Engineering intern
Hi folks, my name's Iain, and I'm one of the few interns you haven't yet heard from this summer. In my last three months on the intern team I've embarked on a whistle stop tour around the FreeAgent application, from user facing emails to developer only APIs. In that time, I've learnt a few softer skills that I never would have had the opportunity to whilst I was at university,… Continue reading
Down the Ruby Mine, Part III: Splat and splat again
Hello and welcome to another Down the Ruby Mine. I’m Sam, one of the Engineering Interns working at FreeAgent over the Summer and I am here to shed some light on a Ruby language feature. If you’re out of the loop, you may have missed my previous posts which can be found here and here. Today we’ll be diving into the most questionably named Ruby feature out there: splat. Functions… Continue reading
Down the Ruby Mine, Part II: Ruby’s seemingly illogical logical operators
Hello there, my name’s Sam and I’m one of the Summer 2019 Engineering Interns at FreeAgent. As part of my time here I’m writing a series of blog posts on Ruby language features. If you’re a first time Down the Ruby Mine reader then don’t fret, because the posts aren’t dependant on each other. However, if you are interested, you can find the first post here. Today we’ll be exploring… Continue reading
Delivering Practice Insights: My internship at FreeAgent
The phrase ‘practice insights’ was something that I heard very often in my first couple of weeks at FreeAgent, between wrapping my head around the data model and trying hard to remember everyone's names. The reason I mention it in the context of the first couple of weeks is because at that point I didn’t fully know what it meant. Of course I knew what the words meant, and I… Continue reading