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Grinding Gears

Tales of code crunching from the FreeAgent Engineering team

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The Mobile Apps and the Tester

Posted by Jessica Yong on January 19, 2021

The replatforming of our hybrid mobile app to separate iOS and Android native apps was already well under way when I arrived at FreeAgent as a test engineer for the mobile team. Since then we have carved out processes that the whole team can contribute to, giving us confidence that for each release our apps are in good shape. Here are a few things we are doing to ensure this.… Continue reading

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Six years of data science and analytics interns at FreeAgent

Posted by Dave Evans on January 7, 2021

It’s hard to believe we’ve been running internships in our data teams for six years now, and we’re about to start recruitment for the seventh time. Things have changed a little since our first intern started, as last year saw more than four times as many staff in the wider team and our first remote internship during the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve always tended to think of our internships as a… Continue reading

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Testing Child Processes in Ruby

Posted by Andy Stabler on January 6, 2021

I was recently writing a piece of code that we wanted to act as a supervisor of child processes. We wanted to ask this supervisor the following “Hello there, would you mind running this task in a child process? Thanks!”. From here the supervisor would create a process, keep track of it so we can stop it if necessary, and run the given piece of code in it. This supervisor… Continue reading

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Moving 100,000 customers from co-lo data centres to the cloud. With zero downtime.

Posted by Olly Headey on December 21, 2020

Running a SaaS app in AWS in 2020 is, in itself, not a particularly remarkable thing. Migrating a complex Rails app that is used daily by over 100,000 customers to an entirely different infrastructure, introducing a new underlying architecture, and doing so without customer downtime, really is something special.  In this article we take a look behind the curtain to see how we achieved this recently at FreeAgent. It's almost… Continue reading

Answering bigger questions with BigQuery

Posted by Jack Gladas on December 1, 2020

Over the past few weeks, we’ve configured BigQuery to enable us to combine our Google Analytics (GA) front-end data with our internal back-end data. In this post I’m going to talk about why we needed to do this, how we went about it and what we are hoping to achieve as a result. What’s the problem? Historically, two separate systems have been used at FreeAgent to track, store and analyse… Continue reading

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Empowering our practices: Take 2

Posted by Lea Whitelaw on October 30, 2020

‘How can we use our data to understand and empower our accountancy practice partners?’ This is the question that I posed in my previous blog about delivering practice insights last summer. This question was the foundation for my project last year and is the one I came back to continue answering this year. To recap how the project was left at the end of last summer; I had created three… Continue reading

Breathing New Life into Dormant Code

Posted by David Whitby on

In the Tax Engineering team at FreeAgent we’re currently working on adding Corporation Tax and Final Accounts filing to our application as we continue our mission to help our customers relax about tax. We’ve been working on these features since June and recently released the Final Accounts report and the CT600 form, but what you might not know is that work on this project originally began back in 2017. So… Continue reading

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Can’t someone else do it? Automating Looker Housekeeping in Two Days

Posted by Rob Brown on October 2, 2020

This blog discusses how, through successful planning and design, we were able to automate some Looker housekeeping tasks in less than 2 days. Continue reading

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Return of the intern

Posted by Lea Whitelaw on October 1, 2020

A year on from my first data science internship at FreeAgent, I’m about to start my second one, and I’m getting ready for my second first day. It’s different this time though. Aside from the fact that I am now a fully fledged graduate (scary!), this internship is going to be based entirely within my living room, as the entire company is now working remotely. I have never worked remotely… Continue reading

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How we publish user events for 100,000 customers

Posted by Eva Koleli on September 15, 2020

The FreeAgent application is currently used by more than 100,000 companies. When users send their invoices, explain their bank transactions and do any other action to take care of their business, these actions are recorded automatically. We record them in different systems and for different purposes. One of the systems where we record actions like these is an event system and these records are called events. Events contain information about… Continue reading

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