New wine, old skins – how FreeAgent blends existing tools and fresh approaches
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
Say hello to some of our women in engineering!
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
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
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
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
Remote Desks (Revisited!)
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
Rest in peace, @mathie
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
Many timezones, one team – How do WE stand up?
Following the post Many timezones, one team - how do you stand up?, we received quite a bit of feedback and interesting ideas. Thanks for that! Today, we'd like to share our experience of how we addressed this particular issue, and how it's working for us so far. This isn't far from some of the feedback we got. TL;DR We created a separate Slack channel to Stand Up / Down… 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
Engineering Desks
It's become somewhat of a custom around the internet to post pictures of your desks, especially when you're not all sat in the same office. I know I certainly enjoy looking at other people's desks & environments, so without further ado, here's our desks & views from around FreeAgent. Caius (Shropshire, UK) Cédric (Lyon, France) Harry (Toronto, Canada) Nathan (Sheffield, UK) Olly (Edinburgh, UK - in our head office) Philip… Continue reading