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
We're hiring! Check out our vacancies 👈
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
Upgrading to Ruby 2.1 (and other fun with YAML and complex regexes)
When we first launched FreeAgent, it ran on Ruby 1.8.6 MRI (and Rails 1.2!). We graduated to 1.8.7 REE when that became popular, then in the summer of 2011 we upgraded to Ruby 1.9.3. We've been running on that version (1.9.3-p194 to be specific) ever since. It has served us well, but performance is not one of Ruby 1.9.3's strong points and we've seen our application server response time gradually… Continue reading
Updated – API 1.0 blackout dates and EOL
We uncovered an issue during our previous blackout dates. We have addressed this and will continue with a further series of API 1.0 blackouts this week. On the following dates requests to API 1.0 will be rejected: 28 January 2014 08:00 GMT - 29 January 2014 08:00 GMT 30 January 2014 08:00 GMT - 31 January 2014 08:00 GMT Assuming no issues are identified during these blackouts, the official end… Continue reading
Atlas Probes
Last Monday evening we received this tweet: @freeagent your servers are running really slow tonight, making data input a real drag — Warwicka (@Warwicka) January 13, 2014 Naturally we take anything like this seriously so we started digging. First stop was New Relic which shows us average application and browser response times as well as a whole host of other useful metrics. Everthing looked normal. OK, time to hit the… Continue reading
Upcoming API 1.0 blackout dates and EOL
Back in October last year I wrote about sunsetting our legacy API at the end of 2013. We're now into the final stage of this decomissioning process. To make this as pain-free as possible, we're going to be running a series of API 1.0 blackouts over the next week. This means that on the following dates requests to API 1.0 will be rejected: 09 January 2014 14:00-16:00 GMT 13 January… Continue reading
Sunsetting API 1.0
We launched the first FreeAgent API back in February 2008. It served us well but 18 months ago we launched our second-generation API. The vast majority of third party apps that integrate with FreeAgent have now migrated over to API 2.0, so we will be shutting down API 1.0 by the end of 2013. We have announced this to our API community already, but we're now reaching out to our… Continue reading