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Grinding Gears

Tales of code crunching from the FreeAgent Engineering team

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The Barbican conservatory where State of the Browser is held with tropical planting growing over the balconies

State of the browser 2025

Posted by Sacha Harmsworth on April 16, 2025

State of the Browser is a small, single-track conference in London. I'd been before, and while it always has a great list of speakers, what I'd forgotten was the extremely welcoming and inclusive atmosphere. For example, it's the first conference I've been to with live captioning, and almost every talk had an accessibility section or angle. Additionally, their business model is built on sponsorship, so they're able to give away… Continue reading

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Mission jQuery Zero: How FreeAgent removed jQuery from our application

Posted by Colin Gemmell on March 24, 2025

Just over 3 years ago FreeAgent was running with 4 front-end frameworks, Stimulus, React with Redux, Rails UJS and jQuery and we were about to start adding Turbo to the stack. Running all these different frameworks was not sustainable and we chose to reduce our number of dependencies and first up was jQuery. We called this our legendary jQuery code, code that had helped us grow a business and provide… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about hotwire or javascript or jquery or ruby on rails

A case of missing validation messages

Posted by James Shadwell on March 13, 2025

I’ve recently worked on two very similar issues within the FreeAgent app, which is a Rails web application. The problem that was reported in both cases was that when a user tried to submit invalid data they didn’t get any kind of message indicating what went wrong. In case it helps someone else (and let’s be honest to remind myself when I undoubtedly come across it again) I thought I’d… Continue reading

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The five stages of AI tool adoption: a developer’s journey

Posted by John Fredrickson on December 19, 2024

Do you remember the first time you opened Excel and discovered pivot tables? Or perhaps that moment when you first held a digital camera after years of developing 35mm film? Maybe it was when you wrote your first SQL query and watched data magically arrange itself exactly as you needed it. These technological transitions in our lives often follow a strikingly similar emotional pattern. The initial rush of discovering something… Continue reading

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Breaking the coding doom loop: lessons from my intern project

Posted by Fiona McLaren on August 6, 2024

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You get a project idea that you’re excited about, create a new GitHub repository, and dive headfirst into coding. Instead of coming away with your new pride and joy, you end up with just another repo in your archive. Well, this has happened to me too, too many times!  With my university projects, I could always produce a good piece of work. But university… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about career progression or experience or internship or planning or project management or software engineering

How the Ruby Interpreter Creates Methods on the Fly

Posted by Matthew O'Donnell on February 28, 2024

(And why it matters!) I was lucky enough to attend last year's EuRuKo, the travelling European Ruby conference. A theme of the conference (for me) was Ruby's infamous embrace of metaprogramming, which I've had little exposure to in my day-to-day as a Rails dev. The approach to this discussion was inspired by this great talk by Masafumi Okura on Code Reading, and much of the detail comes from the book… Continue reading

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The architecture of FreeStyle, our design system

Posted by Anda Popovici on October 23, 2023

We embarked on a journey to create a design system at FreeAgent over 2 years ago. In this blog post I will describe how we structure our design system code and how it’s being used across different codebases. Technologies we use Our main design system consumer is the FreeAgent web application, a Ruby on Rails application. As a result, we write our components using the Ruby on Rails ViewComponent framework… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about architecture or design system or ruby on rails

Ease into Ruby with a Python background

Posted by Joseph Mousa on September 1, 2023

Starting your first role as a software engineer and having no knowledge of the programming language used in your organisation sounds like a nightmare at first, as thoughts of the imposter syndrome that many of us seem to suffer from these days start to take over. But worry not. At FreeAgent the environment is very friendly and relaxed, allowing you as a new joiner to focus on learning and integrating… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about internship or python or ruby

Factories: don’t stop production!

Posted by Bernat Frangi on August 29, 2023

Why this post? Have you ever come across a situation where you need to write a test that uses some model objects, but found that those have endless dependencies on the existence of other objects, from the same model or otherwise? Have you ever come across a test where you only care about a specific attribute of a model object, but you find yourself having to populate every single one… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about factories or internship or software engineering or testing or tools

My internship project: from ideation to implementation

Posted by Stefi Curson on August 21, 2023

When I started my internship at FreeAgent, I had no idea what to expect. I read previous blog posts and saw that interns get up to a wide range of things! I spent my first weeks here doing onboarding tasks and fixing small bugs. Once I’d started to get familiar with the codebase and the way FreeAgent works, it was time to start my project. 😮 My team manages Sudo,… Continue reading

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