How to count what counts
At FreeAgent we’re building a new platform to allow our teams to explore their data and glean new insights from it. The platform is built using Looker on top of Amazon Redshift, and so far it’s been enthusiastically received by the teams that use it. However, the process of building up the platform and driving adoption hasn’t been entirely straightforward. There has been a recurring issue that we’ve have had… Continue reading
Why we love accessibility (and you should too!)
On 16th May it’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a day to “get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access/inclusion and people with different disabilities”. At FreeAgent, our mission is to make small businesses happier and more successful by putting them in control of their finances. A big part of that mission is building software that is accessible and inclusive, so that we can help as many people as possible,… Continue reading
Introducing the Band – James Bell
The Product and Engineering organisation at FreeAgent is now a broad group of over 90 engineers (of various flavours), designers, data scientists, product managers, UX specialists, business analysts, managers and testers. And we're still growing apace! We thought it would be fun to interview some of the team to share a bit of their career history and to provide our readers with some behind-the-scenes insight into what goes on day… Continue reading
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Micro-batching Event Data Into Amazon Redshift
Data is at the heart of our business. We use data to make business critical decisions on a daily basis. It is important that this data is not only accurate but also available when required. Traditionally reports would be generated at a set schedule which made it difficult to decide on next steps in a timely fashion. New technologies like Amazon Kinesis Data Streams enable us to generate these reports… Continue reading
Surviving your first winter as a remote worker
Many of FreeAgent’s engineering team work remotely, spread all around the UK, generally visiting our Edinburgh office once a quarter. (FreeAgent’s remote engineering team - blue arrows show full-time staff, yellow show contractors.) I joined FreeAgent in April 2018 and this was my first experience of being a remote worker. Even though I’d sometimes been able to do one day a week working from home in previous roles, the reality… Continue reading
Separating job applicants in multiple dimensions
The team I work in at FreeAgent is achieving great things - from rolling out a new Business Intelligence tool, to working on machine learning models to improve our product. With so many ideas but not enough time to action them, we recently advertised a number of roles to expand our team. FreeAgent is a superb place to work, and the roles are a real opportunity for someone to achieve… Continue reading
From Finder to Sublime Text
At FreeAgent we work on Macs with a good number of us using iTerm2 and some using Sublime Text. Often I find myself in Finder needing to open a file or folder in Sublime Text. The unfun way is to go Finder -> Services -> Open New iTerm Tab Here and then once that opens type subl .. There's a couple other ways to do this that are more fun… Continue reading
What We Value – Writing Code At FreeAgent
Writing software is hard. The problems we’re trying to solve are generally not trivial. They will have caveats and edge cases. They will rely on unreliable dependencies. The problem may evolve and the solution may need to be tweaked. The solution we’ve carefully crafted might not have taken into consideration something that later seems obvious. The problem might even change entirely. Continue reading
Have your butler do the de-linting
Lots of our infrastructure is managed by Puppet, the open source configuration management tool that uses its own domain specific language (DSL) to describe how services, files and systems should look. The DSL was inspired by Nagios configuration files, so you’ll find lots of nested blocks under curly braces, indentation, groups of parameters assigned with => separators, all of which can begin to look messy in a large manifest, as… Continue reading
FreeAgent is now on Rails 5.2!
As of Monday, 24th of September 2018 FreeAgent is now running on the latest version of Rails. We were inspired by Eileen’s blog post about how GitHub upgraded from Rails 3.2 to 5.2 and we wanted to share with you the challenges we faced and how we managed to overcome them. We faced similar challenges to GitHub and we believe it is worth reiterating them to highlight their significance. Motivation… Continue reading