An Evolution of Bank Feeds: from Yodlee to Open Banking
We care a great deal about bank feeds. They provide the essential link between our users' FreeAgent accounts and their bank accounts, automatically importing transactions each day. From our customers' point of view they're probably the most valuable and most used feature of the software, so they're really important to us too. For many of our customers, the main purpose of using accounting software like FreeAgent is so they don't… Continue reading
On the road to real-time reporting with incremental data transfer
Reporting Data at FreeAgent We keep track of a range of customer behaviours in the FreeAgent application as a means to understand engagement and to formulate and measure our OKRs. Examples of this include support requests raised through our ticketing system, Zendesk, the scores and comments provided by our users during NPS surveys and event data detailing specific actions taken within the application. As a concrete example of the latter,… Continue reading
Serverless: From POC to Production
Building serverless applications means that your developers can focus on their core product instead of worrying about managing and operating servers or runtimes, either in the cloud or on-premises.—Amazon Web Services As FreeAgent begins to move to AWS, there are plenty of opportunities to take advantage of cloud-native technologies such as AWS Lambda. At the beginning of September, one such opportunity presented itself. We decided to create a new serverless… Continue reading
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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
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