All posts written by James Bell
Working from Home: The desks of FreeAgent Engineering
FreeAgent has always been a remote friendly company. When the co-founders started building the company over a decade ago, they were in different parts of the UK. In ordinary times, roughly half of our Engineering team is remote and everyone else works from our lovely, though currently empty, office in Edinburgh. Four years ago we posted a handful of pictures of people’s engineering desks, and as the company has grown… Continue reading
Ruby 2.5: How’s That Backtrace looking?
It’s Christmas night, the air is cool and the stars are unseen through the heavy cloud. Children have left tablet and a nip of whisky out for Santa, and carrots out for the reindeer. One of the children wakes up! Rushing out of bed, she heads to the living room, curious to see if she can catch Santa and reindeer in the act of present delivery. When she gets there,… Continue reading
Ruby 2.5: Not Blocking My Rescue
Rescuing specific exceptions excessively can cause problems, but if you've ever had need to rescue within a do/end block, you might have found yourself using wordy syntax. Ruby 2.5 has a solution for you. In Ruby 2.5, we’ll get a little syntactic sugar for handling exceptions inside do/end blocks. You can see the feature discussion on Ruby’s Redmine instance. If you’ve ever used the shorthand for rescuing inside a method… Continue reading
Ruby 2.5: yield_self
yield_self is coming to Ruby 2.5. What is this long requested feature, and how does it work? Some features take a while to get into a Ruby release. As you can see from the original request on Ruby’s Redmine issue tracker, yield_self has been brewing for 5 years. It has been waiting on a good name, and the Ruby team has settled on one. But what is it? To understand… Continue reading
Ruby 2.5: The Christmas Present
Let's talk a wee bit about Ruby 2.5. This starts a week of looking at upcoming features in the language. Here at FreeAgent Towers, we use a lot of Ruby. The application itself is written in Rails, and our website is static HTML, CSS and JS, but is generated with Middleman. We love it, and so we follow its development closely. One of the exciting points in the Ruby year… Continue reading
Many timezones, one team – how do you stand up?
We like to keep our product teams small. A mixture of designers, engineers and product people working together to add new features and make improvements to different areas of the app. To help keep each team together, we operate with a morning stand up each day, which is designed to help keep everyone up to date. I’m not going to try to sell you on stand ups - if you… Continue reading