Hello and welcome to the all-new FreeAgent engineering team blog!
A lot of work goes on behind the curtain at FreeAgent and we’ve kept rather quiet about this ever since we launched the first iteration of our app (18th September 2007, if you were wondering). This isn’t because we’re unwilling to reveal our secret special sauce (still classified, sorry), more because there has always been such an ever-growing mountain of work we really wanted to do, anything else has taken a backseat.
Now we’re ready to make amends. Not because we’ve run out of things to do (on the contrary, we now have multiple backlogs of work planned across a much wider and more ambitious scope than ever), but because we’ve learned so much over the past four years we feel the need to share our stories from the development trenches with you, both highs and lows. I also want to give our super-talented engineers their own platform to talk about the technologies we’re using to develop and host FreeAgent and the challenges that come when developing at speed and scale.
Some of the upcoming topics we’ll be writing about are our second-generation API (featuring tasty technologies such as OAuth 2.0, JSON and AMQP), migrating our server configuration management to Puppet, the evolution of our infrastructure, monitoring and statistics, and tales of love and war with Ruby and Javascript. And we might even get nostalgic and sentimental about Java, if you play your cards right.
I hope you’ll find the blog both interesting and insightful, so please do let us know what you think and don’t forget to tell your friends. And if you’re excited at the idea of being part of our team and helping us solve some of the challenges we face, then drop us a line because we’re hiring and I’d love to hear from you!
– Olly, FreeAgent CTO