Ease into Ruby with a Python background
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
Factories: don’t stop production!
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
My internship project: from ideation to implementation
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
The web application brand refresh journey
At the beginning of this year the Design System team took on the work of updating the FreeAgent brand, focusing on the web application’s typography, colours and logos (and a few extra bits). You can read more about the new look in Roan’s post. I want to take you on a journey of what updating a 10+ year old codebase was like and the challenges it brought with it. The… Continue reading
Readable Dates in Rails
I was playing around in Swift recently, and wanted a reference to 'one day ago'. This is simple enough in human terms: if it's 9:30 on the 18th of September, 'one day ago' means 9:30 on the 17th of September. The Swift code to do this looks like this: Calendar.current.date( byAdding: .day, value: -1, to: Date.now ) ...and that's just a bit much, isn't it? First we need to access Calendar.current, a singleton… Continue reading
Type checking in Ruby – Part 1
Over the course of a career in software engineering, we learn to love elements of our tooling and dislike others - that’s perfectly natural. As requirements change, including our own need to improve as engineers, so does what appeals to us when reaching for a new framework, language or library. A common path for lots of engineers will have been to learn something like C or C++, both strongly typed… Continue reading
Fixing my first bug – the experience
As a computer science student, I obviously fixed bugs in code before. However, the first one I had to fix at FreeAgent felt significantly different from the corrections I had to make in my university assignments and other small projects. I think that was because whenever I worked on a project, I either wrote the whole code or the project contained just a few files. That meant I could skim… Continue reading
A brief introduction to ‘the cloud’ and managing infrastructure with code
Over the last decade the ‘cloud’ has become increasingly prevalent . A cloud based system allows a company to flexibly buy servers, storage, networking and various other services that are hosted externally rather than on-site, typically with a programmatic interface to allow large-scale use. According to a 2019 report, 94% of companies were utilising the cloud in one way or another. The market for cloud providers was valued at $200… Continue reading
What is a tech spec and why do I need one?
For the past three months, I’ve been a Software Engineering Intern in the Connections & Add-ons team here at FreeAgent. We look after a number of features that allow FreeAgent to work with third-party services: if a business owner wants to get paid faster, they can add a PayPal, Stripe, GoCardless or Tyl payment link to their invoices; if they need to get their business insured, they can sign up… Continue reading
So you’re going to be an intern
After months of nerves, interviews and one too many LeetCode questions, you’ve done it. You’ve landed an internship, you’re free from the dread of a long, empty summer and your brain is filled with vague notions of what your internship might be like. I’m here to gather up your brain clay and sculpt it into solid ideas of what things will be like. Before we start, it needs to be… Continue reading