Shaving yaks – problem solving in Dev Platform
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
From Finder to Sublime Text
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
Have your butler do the de-linting
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
How we run 4 hours of tests in under 4 minutes
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
FreeAgent’s AV Adventure Continues – 12 Months On
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
FreeAgent’s AV Adventure
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