Grinding Gears

Not so long ago, I had an opportunity to peek under the hood of titlecase and underscore methods, the tiny cogs of the “Rails magic” machine. The latter turned out to be a very interesting function—a lot of hard-to-follow transformations, secret injections and the like. All of these bits significantly contributed to an odd-looking bug I’ve been working on.  Today, we’ll unravel the implementation of both methods and look in… Continue reading

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

Here at FreeAgent we deploy updates to our app several times a day, and each deployment used to take between 10 and 15 minutes. This meant that if we introduced a severe bug into production and we needed to rollback, it would take us at least 10 minutes. This situation was not ideal, so we've been working to improve it. A quick look at our deployment process indicated that the… Continue reading