Search results for 'hack days'
Hack Days Feb 2015
We've been running Hack Days at FreeAgent for a few years now. Twice a year everyone in the company takes a two-day break from their normal work, small project teams are formed and magic happens. Yesterday afternoon, after two days of hard work, the team got together and watched 21 (!) demos. That's far too many to write about in detail, so here are a few highlights. Let us know… Continue reading
Can’t someone else do it? Automating Looker Housekeeping in Two Days
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
Hack Week 2.0 round-up
Wow, what a absolute blast. Hack Week 2.0 has now been and gone, we’ve had a weekend to relax and this week we can take the time to look back and reflect on what we achieved. We had just over four days to get our projects polished (Friday afternoon was set aside for demoing our work to the company) so it was a challenge, but one everyone on the team… Continue reading
Hack Week 2.0
Back in January our design and engineering teams took part in our first ever Hack Week and it was a resounding success. A fair few of the Hack Week projects have made their way into FreeAgent in one form or another and some, like App-wide Search, will be coming your way soon. To me, what this shows is that by giving a development team the freedom to hack on whatever… Continue reading
Hack Week update
We’re two days into our first Hack Week and we’re already seeing good progress. Testing is a common theme being worked on by two teams. The FreeAgent code base is fairly large and is complemented by an even larger automated test suite, containing unit, functional and integration tests. This test suite is a massive win for us, enabling developers to aggressively refactor code and be confident that they haven’t introduced… Continue reading
Hack Week [initial commit]
Starting today we’re going to be trying something a little different in our development team. For the entire week our project schedules are being put on ice while all our engineers and designers (12 of them) are being left to their own devices to hack on whatever they want, so long as it’s FreeAgent-related. Hackathons like this are nothing new in the software development world – Google offer 20% time,… Continue reading
The legendary data warehouse application
In spring 2014, I created an internal Ruby on Rails app called data-warehouse. In this blog post I’m going to describe what it was, how it came to be and why, against what would appear to be all reasonable logic, it became the central part of our data infrastructure for about eight years. Continue reading
Using data to understand the effects of a four day working week
As you may have already heard, FreeAgent implemented a four-day week throughout the summer this year as a ‘thank you’ for the employees’ contributions during the pandemic and a year of working from home. Whilst Pat George’s blog post talks about measuring the success of the four-day week with “job satisfaction, business objectives and personal stress levels”, as an analyst, I wanted to see if I could find less anecdotal… Continue reading
Replatforming the iOS mobile app
It has been just over a year since we shipped our replatformed iOS app to great reviews and many happy customers. In this post I would like to take a look back at where we came from and how the FreeAgent mobile app is shaping up for the future. We started developing the mobile app way back in 2014. At the time the entire engineering team was ~20 people and… Continue reading
Wondering where the weeks went: a reminiscent reflection of my FreeAgent internship
It just seems like yesterday when I was settling in at FreeAgent and writing a blog about my first week as a FreeAgent data science intern. Yet here I am, having finished my internship and remembering all of the good times I had. Outside of my internship at FreeAgent, I am a PhD student specialising in veterinary biology, so the last 13 weeks have been a steep learning curve into… Continue reading