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Grinding Gears

Tales of code crunching from the FreeAgent Engineering team

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Hosting Women Who Code Edinburgh

Posted by Carly Amos on March 8, 2022

Last week FreeAgent hosted Women Who Code Edinburgh. We welcomed more than 20 people from a range of backgrounds and locations - due to COVID restrictions we had to host online this time. After an introduction to Women Who Code, we gave three presentations. I gave a talk on Agile Estimation, explaining how Agile estimation works, estimating using relative rather than absolute measures such as time, and the benefits of… Continue reading

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Being an Introvert in a Meeting

Posted by Delphine Rabiller on November 30, 2021

A toolbox to get your voice heard Introvert: a typically reserved or quiet person who tends to be introspective and more comfortable with a small group of people. Context This November, Lea [1], Lana [2] and myself went to the Women of Silicon Roundabout conference. There were a few talks around developing your soft skills to be better in the world of tech. One talk that particularly interested me was… Continue reading

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calendar

Here’s to Thriday

Posted by Pat George on October 4, 2021

The last eighteen months have been very hard.  You know that, you’ve lived it.  We’ve all done what we can in order to get by.  A couple months ago FreeAgent decided to help us do that by giving us Fridays off for the months of July and August.  I admit when it was first announced in our weekly Town Hall I didn’t listen to the rest of the meeting; I… Continue reading

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New wine, old skins – how FreeAgent blends existing tools and fresh approaches

Posted by Joe Carstairs on September 8, 2021

According to the parable in Matthew’s gospel, “no-one pours new wine into old wineskins – otherwise, the wine would burst the wine-skins, and both would be ruined.” So, coming into FreeAgent as an intern, I wondered – would FreeAgent prefer the new wine in the new skins or the old wine in the old skins? Would they satisfy the stereotype of the tech start-up, move fast and break things, trip… Continue reading

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Say hello to some of our women in engineering!

Posted by Katrina Coutts on June 25, 2021

We celebrated International Women in Engineering Day earlier this week with a video featuring some of our own. This inspired a few more of us to mark the occasion and say hello. What’s exciting is that there are many different routes to a career in engineering. Say hello to... Katrina 👋 Who inspires you in the tech world? I think I've been genuinely lucky to start out at FreeAgent. Over… Continue reading

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A view from our office

Working from Home: The desks of FreeAgent Engineering

Posted by James Bell on May 18, 2020

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

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Introducing the Band – James Bell

Posted by Olly Headey on April 26, 2019

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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Surviving your first winter as a remote worker

Posted by John Fredrickson on March 22, 2019

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

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Remote Desks (Revisited!)

Posted by Caius Durling on May 18, 2018

Back in 2015 we joined in with an internet custom by posting pictures of our desks in all their glorious variety. Now that it's 2018, National Work from Home Day and a few years since that post, a followup is in order. Some folks have moved, others have joined and we don't often get to look at one another's desks—usually we get to see what's behind them on video calls!… Continue reading

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Rest in peace, @mathie

Posted by Olly Headey on August 22, 2016

There wasn't supposed to be anything particularly unusual about today. It started out as a typically drizzly Edinburgh summer morning, grey clouds hanging low above the castle, with just a hopeful glimpse of blue in the distance offering the prospect of a little respite later in the day. It wasn't until I arrived at my desk and checked our Slack channels that I first heard the shocking news of the… Continue reading

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