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
We're hiring! Check out our vacancies 👈
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
Understanding the Rails Logger
I've lost track of why now, but I've spent a bit of time this afternoon trying to understand how the Rails logger works in production. For years we've been using a Hodel 3000 Compliant Logger, which is dead straightforward. Recently, though, we switched back to using the built in logger with Rails, which is a little more subtle. The default logger in Rails is the BufferedLogger from ActiveSupport. It can… Continue reading
Friday Link Party
What we've been reading about this week: New Relic regularly release statistics about the apps they're monitoring. The latest State of the Stack makes for interesting reading as usual. It shows that Ruby 1.9.2 is fast catching up with 1.8.7 and Rails 3.0 is the most popular Rails version. Thin and Passenger are still by far the most popular dispatchers. If you're interested, FreeAgent is currently running on Ruby 1.9.2-p180… Continue reading
Goodbye, Steve
"I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did" Steve Jobs, 2005 Continue reading
Friday Link Party – what we’re reading
There’s a whole lot of talk in our Campfire dev chat room all week, and quite a few links get thrown in there. It’s hard to keep up sometimes, so I’ve decided to start collating them for posterity and to share with our developer community each week. So here are the main things we’ve been reading about this week: Moneta is a library by Yehuda Katz that provides a single… Continue reading
Tales of a FreeAgent Summer Intern, 2011
Hi all! I’m one of this year’s summer engineering interns at FreeAgent and I would like to introduce myself, give you an overview of what it’s like working for FreeAgent, and finally share a few of my work experiences with you. First though, a little about myself: I’m a 4th year student at the University of Edinburgh, studying Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence. My main interests include rock-climbing, snowboarding, and… Continue reading