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
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
Conference Pairs
At FreeAgent we strive to create the best working environment we can for our Engineering team. A happy employee is a productive employee and, as an engineer myself, I understand that there's little that makes us happier than fast interwebs, great coffee (or tea, served from a teapot, naturally), free beer (or Irn Bru), shiny new toys and an endless supply of challenging code to craft. This is why we… Continue reading
Hack Week round up
Hack Week has been and gone and I’ve finally got around to collating feedback from the team. To give you better insight into what everyone worked on, and the outcome of their efforts, each team has written about the projects they took on and what they achieved. Test Suite Speed #1 Ben: I investigated the effects of garbage collection on our test suite speed. I tried turning off GC entirely… 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
Friday Link Party 11-11-11
Totally forgot to post here last week so this week it's a special, bumper, 'rollover' edition of link goodness. Here we go... We're hard at work putting the finishing touches to our second generation API right now. The new API uses OAuth as opposed to HTTP Basic for authentication, so OAuthPlayground popped up at just the right time. In the latest Clean Coders episode, 'uncle' Bob Martin talks about the… Continue reading
Friday Link Party – 21st Oct 2011
What we've been Instapapering this week: We do a lot of testing at FreeAgent, for good reason. We also do peer reviews of code so Why code review beats testing: evidence from decades of programming research was an encouraging read. Robert X Cringely's column is always worth reading. Recently he wrote about The Second Coming of Java, in which he asks if database servers switch to SSDs and disk I/O… Continue reading
Friday Link Party
What we've been reading about this week: New Relic regularly release statistics about the apps they're monitoring. The latest State of the Stack makes for interesting reading as usual. It shows that Ruby 1.9.2 is fast catching up with 1.8.7 and Rails 3.0 is the most popular Rails version. Thin and Passenger are still by far the most popular dispatchers. If you're interested, FreeAgent is currently running on Ruby 1.9.2-p180… Continue reading