Working from Home: The desks of FreeAgent Engineering
FreeAgent has always been a remote friendly company. When the co-founders started building the company over a decade ago, they were in different parts of the UK. In ordinary times, roughly half of our Engineering team is remote and everyone else works from our lovely, though currently empty, office in Edinburgh. Four years ago we posted a handful of pictures of people’s engineering desks, and as the company has grown… Continue reading
How to Measure Pointless Things?
Here at FreeAgent we, like so many other workplaces around the world, have been adjusting to a fully remote setup over the past few weeks. Whilst a significant number of our company’s employees are permanently home-based, only one of our seven Analytics & Data Science team members is usually based away from our Edinburgh office. It has felt strange. We decided fairly quickly that we needed to create new opportunities… Continue reading
Tooled Up. A brief history of SaaS tools we’ve loved (and lost)
Distributed (remote) working has always been a foundation of the Engineering team at FreeAgent. Our entire company was founded as a distributed team and over the years we've managed to maintain a 50% distributed-to-office staff ratio in Engineering. The tools we use to work effectively as a distributed team have changed over the years, but there are a number of stalwarts that we've used since 2007 and still love today.… Continue reading
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An Evolution of Bank Feeds: from Yodlee to Open Banking
We care a great deal about bank feeds. They provide the essential link between our users' FreeAgent accounts and their bank accounts, automatically importing transactions each day. From our customers' point of view they're probably the most valuable and most used feature of the software, so they're really important to us too. For many of our customers, the main purpose of using accounting software like FreeAgent is so they don't… Continue reading
On the road to real-time reporting with incremental data transfer
Reporting Data at FreeAgent We keep track of a range of customer behaviours in the FreeAgent application as a means to understand engagement and to formulate and measure our OKRs. Examples of this include support requests raised through our ticketing system, Zendesk, the scores and comments provided by our users during NPS surveys and event data detailing specific actions taken within the application. As a concrete example of the latter,… Continue reading
Serverless: From POC to Production
Building serverless applications means that your developers can focus on their core product instead of worrying about managing and operating servers or runtimes, either in the cloud or on-premises.—Amazon Web Services As FreeAgent begins to move to AWS, there are plenty of opportunities to take advantage of cloud-native technologies such as AWS Lambda. At the beginning of September, one such opportunity presented itself. We decided to create a new serverless… Continue reading
Let’s talk tools
In a recent workshop, we were talking about our toolchains, recommending tools to one another that we couldn't live without. We shared them with the rest of the engineering team and they gave further suggestions of their setups. I've collected them all together so you can find your new favourite tool and increase your productivity! Let's get into it. Browser Extensions Octotree is a browser plugin that gives you a… Continue reading
Rails Girls London 2019: A fun weekend of coding
Fast becoming my favourite event of the year is Rails Girls London. Every event is different as you get to spend it with a whole new group of interesting people from a huge variety of industries and backgrounds. This year we headed to the offices of Simply Business in the City of London for the one-and-a-half day workshop, and happily with FreeAgent sponsoring for the first time. Between the pool… Continue reading
Head In The Clouds
Seven years ago we started planning our first major infrastructure migration. Nine months later we made the move, taking FreeAgent from our first home in Rackspace London to a new, co-located home in two data centres (DCs) run by The Bunker. FreeAgent has been happily humming along in Ash and Greenham Common ever since. Co-locating has been a terrific win for us over the years, providing us with a cost-effective,… Continue reading
How To Write A Good Bug Report
Hi there! My name is Dave and, as a Support Engineer at FreeAgent, I spend a lot of my time talking to our customers, our support agents and our software developers about the behaviour (and occasional misbehaviour) of our product. Fixing a product issue is an incredible opportunity to delight your users and show that, when push comes to shove, you stand by your service and your customers. During my… Continue reading