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Grinding Gears

Tales of code crunching from the FreeAgent Engineering team

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The web application brand refresh journey

Posted by Lea Bialachowski on 26 July 2023

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

➼ Read other posts about brand or front-end or project management or software engineering

Readable Dates in Rails

Posted by Matthew O'Donnell on 12 June 2023

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

➼ Read other posts about active support or deep dive or ruby or ruby on rails

Type checking in Ruby – Part 1

Posted by Paul Hendrick on 9 September 2022

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

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Fixing my first bug – the experience

Posted by Ksenia on 1 September 2022

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

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A brief introduction to ‘the cloud’ and managing infrastructure with code

Posted by David Bloomfield on 31 August 2022

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

➼ Read other posts about AWS or cloud resources or Gruntwork or IaC or infrastructure or internship or Terraform or Terragrunt

What is a tech spec and why do I need one?

Posted by Brad Turner on 26 August 2022

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

➼ Read other posts about documentation or internship or software engineering

So you’re going to be an intern

Posted by Ross Burnett on 25 August 2022

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

➼ Read other posts about internship or ruby on rails or software engineering or testing

CSS Day conference, June 2022

Posted by Laurence Hughes on 24 August 2022

In early June 2022, Laurence and Ryan from our Design System team visited Amsterdam for CSS Day. Here, they reflect on an inspiring two days of learning and community. Continue reading

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Engineering lessons from my SaaS startup

Posted by Angus Dolan on 9 August 2022

I’m now almost two months into my software engineering summer internship at FreeAgent. When I was 18, I chose to delay the start of my university course for 18 months to have a go at building a ‘Software as a Service’ (or ‘SaaS’) startup with two others. Our software, ‘trackio’, was a bring-your-own data platform that allowed sales teams to collect, connect and reconcile their disjointed data sources. It was… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about internship or product development or SaaS or software engineering or startup or university

How to boost your confidence as a beginner software engineer

Posted by Magdalena Veleva on 8 August 2022

Every engineer has questioned at least once in their life whether they are skilled enough for their chosen field. I experienced these doubts when I started my computer science degree at university, and despite the fact that I got through the first three years successfully, I still wasn’t fully confident in my abilities when I started my internship at FreeAgent.  However, this is entirely normal. Every engineer faces challenges on… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about career progression or confidence or experience or internship or software engineering or success or university

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