The five stages of AI tool adoption: a developer’s journey
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
Breaking the coding doom loop: lessons from my intern project
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
How the Ruby Interpreter Creates Methods on the Fly
(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
The architecture of FreeStyle, our design system
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
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