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Grinding Gears

Tales of code crunching from the FreeAgent Engineering team

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A case of missing validation messages

Posted by James Shadwell on 13 March 2025

I’ve recently worked on two very similar issues within the FreeAgent app, which is a Rails web application. The problem that was reported in both cases was that when a user tried to submit invalid data they didn’t get any kind of message indicating what went wrong. In case it helps someone else (and let’s be honest to remind myself when I undoubtedly come across it again) I thought I’d… Continue reading

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Factories: don’t stop production!

Posted by Bernat Frangi on 29 August 2023

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

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How to survive imposter syndrome in your software engineering internship

Posted by Fiona McLaren on 22 August 2023

Hi there! My name is Fiona, and I am an intern at FreeAgent. I got my offer and dodged returning to the monotony of bar work that I endured last summer. However, I was only in my second year of studying Computer Science. How was I chosen from what must have been a sea of applicants? They must have overlooked someone! Had I lucked out? In hindsight, this was a… Continue reading

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Fireside chats about tech careers and automation paranoia

Posted by Angus Dolan on 21 August 2023

I read a book called Coders at Work by Peter Seibel before starting university. Inspired by the format of Jessica Livingston’s Founders at Work, each chapter features an interview with an accomplished programmer. The interview style of writing feels like a personal conversation, offering a rare look into the thought processes of some very impressive people. I'm currently in my second internship at FreeAgent. Last year, I wrote a blog… Continue reading

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In full flow: moving from Jenkins to Actions – Part 1

Posted by Daniel Holz on 10 June 2022

At FreeAgent a recent project to move our Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) workflows from Jenkins to GitHub Actions has brought some real benefits. In this post we’ll cover the background of our CI/CD pipelines, why we wanted to change how they run, and how we decided on GitHub Actions. In the next post we’ll cover how we handled the migration, and how we solved the challenges we encountered. But let’s… Continue reading

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