My Summmer Internship at FreeAgent, 2013
This summer I left the silver city to work for FreeAgent, makers of online accounting software in Edinburgh. I was working with one other intern and our first project was to add Stripe integration for paying invoices. There was already a structure for other payment processors so this was easy - just copy the pattern and we’re done! ...Or not. After years of minimal feedback, someone was looking at my… Continue reading
Staying On Track
We were fortunate to start FreeAgent at a point in time when things had just taken a turn for the better for web developers. Prior to 2005, I was writing web apps in Java using technologies such as Spring, Velocity and (sorry for swearing) Struts. Then along came Ruby on Rails. Rails was perfect for our bootstrapped startup. Its conventions allowed us to focus on rapidly developing the core functionality… Continue reading
Going Underground
Back in the hazy days of last summer we kicked off a project to improve the infrastructure behind FreeAgent, to prepare ourselves for an order of magnitude (or two) of very high growth in the coming years, as well as greatly bolstering our DR capablility. Deciding on a hosting strategy is not simple. Unlike when we first started FreeAgent, today there are a multitude of options: full cloud hosting, fully-managed… Continue reading
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Summer Internships in Engineering – apply for the Class of 2013
For the past three years we have invited interns to join our Edinburgh-based Engineering team for the summer months between June and September. Today we're officially opening the doors to the Class of 2013! Last year's interns developed one of FreeAgent's most requested features, the Online Payment Portal, so you'll get to work on an exciting project, not mundane work. If you're a keen hacker and a CompSci (or similar)… Continue reading
Revving the engine
At FreeAgent we deal with a lot of accounting data - every invoice, bank transaction, expense and VAT return in the system must be processed, and its tax and accounting effects calculated and recorded. In the early days of FreeAgent this was something that was baked directly into the business objects – reporting data was pulled directly from the day-to-day business records. As the number of users grew and the… Continue reading
Switching wings mid-flight
How would you choose to release a completely redesigned version of your web application? Capistrano? Git hooks? Copying files over SFTP? Now imagine your application serves over 21,000 active, multi-user accounts. It’s a very busy app, and forms the backbone of many of those users’ livelihoods. At that point, the question perhaps becomes less about “how”, and more about “when”. 1am? And how long is the downtime going to be?… Continue reading
Hack Week 2.0 round-up
Wow, what a absolute blast. Hack Week 2.0 has now been and gone, we’ve had a weekend to relax and this week we can take the time to look back and reflect on what we achieved. We had just over four days to get our projects polished (Friday afternoon was set aside for demoing our work to the company) so it was a challenge, but one everyone on the team… Continue reading
Hack Week 2.0
Back in January our design and engineering teams took part in our first ever Hack Week and it was a resounding success. A fair few of the Hack Week projects have made their way into FreeAgent in one form or another and some, like App-wide Search, will be coming your way soon. To me, what this shows is that by giving a development team the freedom to hack on whatever… Continue reading
Bunking off
The FreeAgent Ops team head off on a two-day road trip this morning as we start the initial phase of our plan to build a new home for FreeAgent, the app. Since the company was initially founded we have hosted FreeAgent with Rackspace UK, on the outskirts of London. Our infrastructure has grown dramatically over the past 18 months as our customer base has rapidly increased. The introduction of our… Continue reading
Conference Pairs
At FreeAgent we strive to create the best working environment we can for our Engineering team. A happy employee is a productive employee and, as an engineer myself, I understand that there's little that makes us happier than fast interwebs, great coffee (or tea, served from a teapot, naturally), free beer (or Irn Bru), shiny new toys and an endless supply of challenging code to craft. This is why we… Continue reading