Search results for 'intern'
FreeAgent is now on Rails 5.2!
As of Monday, 24th of September 2018 FreeAgent is now running on the latest version of Rails. We were inspired by Eileen’s blog post about how GitHub upgraded from Rails 3.2 to 5.2 and we wanted to share with you the challenges we faced and how we managed to overcome them. We faced similar challenges to GitHub and we believe it is worth reiterating them to highlight their significance. Motivation… Continue reading
My Summer @ FreeAgent
Hi, I’m Struan. Nice to meet you. I’ve been working at FreeAgent over the summer as an Engineering Intern within the Workflow team and to round off my time here, I’ve written an Engineering Blog post about my internship, covering the main projects that I’ve been working on over the past three months. The Beginning My time at FreeAgent started off with meeting the Workflow team, my team for the… Continue reading
Clean house: clear mind. Clean data: clear findings.
Soon after settling in at FreeAgent and getting to grips with my role as a data science intern, I got the opportunity to present some of the data that I had been working on at a ‘town hall’, a company-wide weekly meeting where everyone gets together to present their work, share news and pitch ideas. The data I presented was attitudinal survey data from accountancy practices that had contracts with… Continue reading
Remote Desks (Revisited!)
Back in 2015 we joined in with an internet custom by posting pictures of our desks in all their glorious variety. Now that it's 2018, National Work from Home Day and a few years since that post, a followup is in order. Some folks have moved, others have joined and we don't often get to look at one another's desks—usually we get to see what's behind them on video calls!… Continue reading
Running a high-availability SaaS infrastructure without breaking the bank
The cloud is commoditising web application hosting but at FreeAgent we continue to build and manage our own infrastructure, using hand-picked servers, switches and elbow grease. Why we do this is a question I commonly get asked. In this article I'll share our hosting history, how it has evolved over the last ten years, and how we now operate a high-availability SaaS infrastructure on our own hardware without breaking the… Continue reading
Programming, Burgers, and Treasure: Summer with FreeAgent
This summer it has been my pleasure to join FreeAgent as a Data Engineering intern. Alongside the analytics and architecture teams, I have been working on a new exciting feature to complement the FreeAgent application. Programming mostly with Python, I have learned a great deal from my colleagues, and I wish to share the experience with you all here on the engineering blog. Since joining in early June, the intern… Continue reading
Engineering Desks
It's become somewhat of a custom around the internet to post pictures of your desks, especially when you're not all sat in the same office. I know I certainly enjoy looking at other people's desks & environments, so without further ado, here's our desks & views from around FreeAgent. Caius (Shropshire, UK) Cédric (Lyon, France) Harry (Toronto, Canada) Nathan (Sheffield, UK) Olly (Edinburgh, UK - in our head office) Philip… Continue reading
Weak DH – Time to Level Up
SSL vulnerabilities have been big news over the last few years. We've had Heartbleed, CSS Injection, POODLE and FREAK among others. At FreeAgent we take these vulnerabilities very seriously and work to mitigate these as fast as possible. The one we will be looking at today is Weak Diffie-Hellman and the Logjam Attack and some changes we are going to be making in the coming months. SSL configuration can be… Continue reading
System hardening leads to CVE-2015-3341 and fun with DTrace
Here at FreeAgent, security is a never-ending project. We are never finished, and we are always looking for ways to harden our platform, ensuring data is kept safe. Security should not be taken for granted – it is not just about technical mitigations or fancy enterprise firewalls, equally important is developing the right set of processes and procedures. One important aspect is testing your security controls. You need to be… Continue reading
React Europe 2015
We love React here at FreeAgent. Our team has been using it heavily to build the mobile app, with very few issues. Because it’s so easy to use and helps with maintenance of complex UIs, we’ve also started migrating parts of the desktop app to it, such as inline bank explanations. At the beginning of July, a few of us went to Paris to attend the first React Europe conference.… Continue reading