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Grinding Gears

Tales of code crunching from the FreeAgent Engineering team

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Getting started with Jupyter Notebook

Posted by Ferdinand Becker on July 12, 2022

Jupyter Notebook is a development environment that runs in your web browser and can be used with several languages, including R and Python. In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the benefits of using Jupyter Notebook and how to start using it with Python.  Benefits of Jupyter Notebook Chunking code into cells Instead of having to write code in large flat files, developers can use Jupyter Notebook to… Continue reading

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Tooled Up. A brief history of SaaS tools we’ve loved (and lost)

Posted by Olly Headey on April 3, 2020

Distributed (remote) working has always been a foundation of the Engineering team at FreeAgent. Our entire company was founded as a distributed team and over the years we've managed to maintain a 50% distributed-to-office staff ratio in Engineering. The tools we use to work effectively as a distributed team have changed over the years, but there are a number of stalwarts that we've used since 2007 and still love today.… Continue reading

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An Evolution of Bank Feeds: from Yodlee to Open Banking

Posted by Tom Corley on March 6, 2020

We care a great deal about bank feeds. They provide the essential link between our users' FreeAgent accounts and their bank accounts, automatically importing transactions each day. From our customers' point of view they're probably the most valuable and most used feature of the software, so they're really important to us too. For many of our customers, the main purpose of using accounting software like FreeAgent is so they don't… Continue reading

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Let’s talk tools

Posted by Will Mathewson on December 2, 2019

In a recent workshop, we were talking about our toolchains, recommending tools to one another that we couldn't live without. We shared them with the rest of the engineering team and they gave further suggestions of their setups. I've collected them all together so you can find your new favourite tool and increase your productivity! Let's get into it. Browser Extensions Octotree is a browser plugin that gives you a… Continue reading

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Shaving yaks – problem solving in Dev Platform

Posted by Tom Corley on June 19, 2019

Although I usually work in Support Engineering here at FreeAgent, I was recently given the opportunity to spend a six-week cycle working in the Dev Platform team. The technical aspect of the Support Engineer role is what drives me; I love to take a problem, dig into the source code and figure out how to solve it. The work in Dev Platform promised to be even more technical so I… Continue reading

➼ Read other posts about continuous integration or dev-ops or infrastructure or jenkins or testing or yak shaving

From Finder to Sublime Text

Posted by Pat George on January 17, 2019

At FreeAgent we work on Macs with a good number of us using iTerm2 and some using Sublime Text. Often I find myself in Finder needing to open a file or folder in Sublime Text. The unfun way is to go Finder -> Services -> Open New iTerm Tab Here and then once that opens type subl .. There's a couple other ways to do this that are more fun… Continue reading

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Have your butler do the de-linting

Posted by Dominic Cleal on October 11, 2018

Lots of our infrastructure is managed by Puppet, the open source configuration management tool that uses its own domain specific language (DSL) to describe how services, files and systems should look. The DSL was inspired by Nagios configuration files, so you’ll find lots of nested blocks under curly braces, indentation, groups of parameters assigned with => separators, all of which can begin to look messy in a large manifest, as… Continue reading

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How we run 4 hours of tests in under 4 minutes

Posted by Donal McBreen on May 5, 2016

Here at FreeAgent we have a test suite that contains over 21,000 individual RSpec examples. Currently it takes approximately 4 hours to run in a single process. Here’s how we’ve tuned our test suite and CI system (Jenkins) to run them in under 4 minutes. 1. Parallelise The first step is to run the specs in parallel. Test queue We use test-queue, a parallel test runner by Aman Gupta. It… Continue reading

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FreeAgent’s AV Adventure Continues – 12 Months On

Posted by Dave Jones on January 19, 2016

It has been exactly a year since my first blog post about FreeAgent’s AV Adventure. A lot has changed since then so I’d love to bring you up to speed. For those who haven’t read the original blog post, I’d strongly encourage you to; it outlines our business requirements and gives some background on our earlier AV experiments. When you last saw our boardroom, it was equipped with four desktop… Continue reading

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FreeAgent’s AV Adventure

Posted by Dave Jones on January 19, 2015

As the FreeAgent team continues to grow, we’re finding that more of our staff are based remotely, either working from home or visiting our customers on the road. As such, we’ve been working hard to lessen the divide between office staff and our teams out in the wild. It’s super-important that everyone feels connected and that we can continue to communicate effectively, as if we were all in the same… Continue reading

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