Here at FreeAgent Towers we’ve always been proud of the fact that Scotland held the UK’s largest Ruby conference every year since 2008 (back when it was called Scotland on Rails). The SRC o... (read more)
We’ve been running Hack Days at FreeAgent for a few years now. Twice a year everyone in the company takes a two-day break from their normal work, small project teams are formed and magic happens. Yesterday afternoon, after two days of hard work, the team got together and watched 21 (!) demos. That’s far too many to write about in detail, so h... (read more)
When we first launched FreeAgent, it ran on Ruby 1.8.6 MRI (and Rails 1.2!). We graduated to 1.8.7 REE when that became popular, then in the summer of 2011 we upgraded to Ruby 1.9.3. We’ve been running on that version (1.9.3-p194 to be specific) ever since. It has served us well, but performa... (read more)
We uncovered an issue during our previous blackout dates. We have addressed this and will continue with a further series of API 1.0 blackouts this week. On the following dates requests to API 1.0 will be rejected:
Back in October last year I wrote about sunsetting our legacy API at the end of 2013. We’re now into the final stage of this decomissioning process. To make this as pain-free as possible, we’re going to be running a series of API 1.0 blackouts over the next week. ... (read more)
We launched the first FreeAgent API back in February 2008. It served us well but 18 months ago we launched our second-generation API.
The vast majority of (read more)
We were fortunate to start FreeAgent at a point in time when things had just taken a turn for the better for web developers. Prior to 2005, I was writing web apps in Java using technologies such as Spring, Velocity and (sorry for swearing) Struts.
Then along came Ruby on Rails. (read more)
Back in the hazy days of last summer we kicked off a project to improve the infrastructure behind FreeAgent, to prepare ourselves for an order of magnitude (or two) of very high growth in the coming years, as well as greatly bolstering our DR capablility. Deciding on a hosting strat... (read more)
For the past three years we have invited interns to join our Edinburgh-based Engineering team for the summer months between June and September. Today we’re officially opening the doors to the Class of 2013! Last year’s interns developed one of FreeAgent’s most requested features, the (read more)
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 t... (read more)
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... (read more)
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 Rack... (read more)
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 lit...
(read more)
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. (read more)
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 (read more)
We’re two days into our first Hack Week and we’re already seeing good progress.
Testing is a common theme being worked on by two teams. The FreeAgent code base is fairly large and is complemented by an even larger automated test suite, containing unit, functional and integration test... (read more)
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.
(read more)
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... (read more)
Totally forgot to post here last week so this week it’s a special, bumper, ‘rollover’ edition of link goodness. Here we go…
What we’ve been Instapapering this week:
What we’ve been reading about this week:
“I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did”
Steve Jobs, 2005
(read more)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:
Hello and welcome to the all-new FreeAgent engineering team blog!
A lot of work goes on behind the curtain at FreeAgent and we’ve kept rather quiet about this ever since we launched the first iteration of our app (18th September 2007, if you were wondering). This isn’t because we’re unwilling to reveal our secret special sauce (still classified, sorry), more because there has always been such an ever-growing mountain of work we really wanted to do, anything else has taken a backseat. (read more)