CoffeeScript with jQuery sprinkles
This is part two of a two part intro to CoffeeScript. part one part two So my last article on CoffeeScript certainly seemed to provoke some thought. Some of you even found it useful, which is all sorts of awesome. If you haven't had a look at that article, I'd advise doing that first, as this one builds on it. There is one more thing I’d like to touch on… Continue reading
! ‘CoffeeScript: two sugars, no bitter aftertaste’
This is part one of a two part intro to CoffeeScript. part one part two The FreeAgent web application runs on Rails, and around the corner for us is an upgrade to Rails 3.1. This will bring many benefits to performance, but one of the things I'm most excited about is the asset pipeline. This makes JS and CSS assets first-class Rails citizens, and as a bonus, allows us built-in… Continue reading
Hack Week round up
Hack Week has been and gone and I’ve finally got around to collating feedback from the team. To give you better insight into what everyone worked on, and the outcome of their efforts, each team has written about the projects they took on and what they achieved. Test Suite Speed #1 Ben: I investigated the effects of garbage collection on our test suite speed. I tried turning off GC entirely… Continue reading
We're hiring! Check out our vacancies 👈
Engineering Summer Interns
Every summer we invite at least one intern to join our Edinburgh-based Engineering team for three months between June and September and today we're officially opening the doors to the Class of 2012! If you're a CompSci student at a UK university and you want to do something amazing this summer, please get in touch! Find out all the details on our Jobs Page. Continue reading
Hack Week update
We’re two days into our first Hack Week and we’re already seeing good progress. Testing is a common theme being worked on by two teams. The FreeAgent code base is fairly large and is complemented by an even larger automated test suite, containing unit, functional and integration tests. This test suite is a massive win for us, enabling developers to aggressively refactor code and be confident that they haven’t introduced… Continue reading
Hack Week [initial commit]
Starting today we’re going to be trying something a little different in our development team. For the entire week our project schedules are being put on ice while all our engineers and designers (12 of them) are being left to their own devices to hack on whatever they want, so long as it’s FreeAgent-related. Hackathons like this are nothing new in the software development world – Google offer 20% time,… Continue reading
Puppet and MCollective Talk
Thomas Haggett, one of our senior platform engineers, recently gave a talk at a Scottish Ruby User Group meetup about Puppet and MCollective, two technologies we've been embracing in anger at FreeAgent in 2011. We'll be blogging about what we're doing with these technologies in detail in the coming months but in the meantime, here's a little taster video: Thomas Haggett - Puppet from Cultivate on Vimeo. Continue reading
Speeding up SSL
SSL is great; widely supported, easy to set-up, relatively cheap these days and (relatively) secure. We've required it from our early days and it hasn't caused us too many issues other than needing us to renew our SSL certificates from time to time and requiring a few more IP addresses than we otherwise would have needed1. That said, I recently visited Portland to attend PuppetConf (all about Puppet, a configuration… Continue reading
Friday Link Party 11-11-11
Totally forgot to post here last week so this week it's a special, bumper, 'rollover' edition of link goodness. Here we go... We're hard at work putting the finishing touches to our second generation API right now. The new API uses OAuth as opposed to HTTP Basic for authentication, so OAuthPlayground popped up at just the right time. In the latest Clean Coders episode, 'uncle' Bob Martin talks about the… Continue reading
Friday Link Party – 21st Oct 2011
What we've been Instapapering this week: We do a lot of testing at FreeAgent, for good reason. We also do peer reviews of code so Why code review beats testing: evidence from decades of programming research was an encouraging read. Robert X Cringely's column is always worth reading. Recently he wrote about The Second Coming of Java, in which he asks if database servers switch to SSDs and disk I/O… Continue reading