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
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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
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
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