Many timezones, one team – how do you stand up?
We like to keep our product teams small. A mixture of designers, engineers and product people working together to add new features and make improvements to different areas of the app. To help keep each team together, we operate with a morning stand up each day, which is designed to help keep everyone up to date. I’m not going to try to sell you on stand ups - if you… Continue reading
Being a data science intern
Fiona Christie joined us here at FreeAgent on a 3-month internship with our Data Science team this summer after completing an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Glasgow. She impressed us so much that we offered her a full-time role and we even managed to persuade her to write this post about her experience as an intern. Condensing my time at FreeAgent into one post hasn’t… Continue reading
Engineering Desks
It's become somewhat of a custom around the internet to post pictures of your desks, especially when you're not all sat in the same office. I know I certainly enjoy looking at other people's desks & environments, so without further ado, here's our desks & views from around FreeAgent. Caius (Shropshire, UK) Cédric (Lyon, France) Harry (Toronto, Canada) Nathan (Sheffield, UK) Olly (Edinburgh, UK - in our head office) Philip… Continue reading
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Weak DH – Time to Level Up
SSL vulnerabilities have been big news over the last few years. We've had Heartbleed, CSS Injection, POODLE and FREAK among others. At FreeAgent we take these vulnerabilities very seriously and work to mitigate these as fast as possible. The one we will be looking at today is Weak Diffie-Hellman and the Logjam Attack and some changes we are going to be making in the coming months. SSL configuration can be… Continue reading
System hardening leads to CVE-2015-3341 and fun with DTrace
Here at FreeAgent, security is a never-ending project. We are never finished, and we are always looking for ways to harden our platform, ensuring data is kept safe. Security should not be taken for granted – it is not just about technical mitigations or fancy enterprise firewalls, equally important is developing the right set of processes and procedures. One important aspect is testing your security controls. You need to be… Continue reading
React Europe 2015
We love React here at FreeAgent. Our team has been using it heavily to build the mobile app, with very few issues. Because it’s so easy to use and helps with maintenance of complex UIs, we’ve also started migrating parts of the desktop app to it, such as inline bank explanations. At the beginning of July, a few of us went to Paris to attend the first React Europe conference.… Continue reading
Brighton Ruby 2015
Here at FreeAgent Towers we've always been proud of the fact that Scotland held the UK's largest Ruby conference every year since 2008 (back when it was called Scotland on Rails). The SRC organisers have hung up their conference boots for 2015 but fortunately there are other regional Ruby conferences getting off the ground. One of these is Brighton Ruby. A couple of FreeAgents were at the inaugural Brighton Ruby… Continue reading
Complexity will bite you in production
Here at FreeAgent we deploy updates to our app several times a day, and each deployment used to take between 10 and 15 minutes. This meant that if we introduced a severe bug into production and we needed to rollback, it would take us at least 10 minutes. This situation was not ideal, so we've been working to improve it. A quick look at our deployment process indicated that the… Continue reading
Hack Days Feb 2015
We've been running Hack Days at FreeAgent for a few years now. Twice a year everyone in the company takes a two-day break from their normal work, small project teams are formed and magic happens. Yesterday afternoon, after two days of hard work, the team got together and watched 21 (!) demos. That's far too many to write about in detail, so here are a few highlights. Let us know… 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