Double take: Introduction to Arel & Cultivating Code

Please note: This meetup is taking place on Wednesday, instead of our usual Monday timeslot.

Introduction to Arel (~15mins)

The talk will be an introduction to Arel, discussing:

• what is Arel and when to use it?

• what are the syntactic differences from ActiveRecord?

• examples of query building with Arel

Cultivating Code (~40mins)

“The Pragmatic Programmer” first introduced me to the idea that writing software is like planting a garden. Over the years I’d forgotten the importance of the metaphor, until recently when I started working on my real-world garden. Musing on my day in the office whilst tending my plants, I realised gardening really does have a lot in common with working with legacy code.

With a 10-year-old, monolithic code base that’s still being worked on, staying on top of maintenance at FreeAgent is no easy matter. In this talk I’ll share how thinking about development in terms of gardening has helped me to understand the maintenance burden. I’ll talk about how we handle routine and exceptional maintenance in the product teams at FreeAgent and I’ll share some of the techniques we use to balance maintenance with feature development.

Not this side of the Pennines on Wednesday? Eva & Ceri are also talking at NWRUG on Thursday - more details are available on NWRUG site.

About our speakers

Eva Koleli is a software engineer at FreeAgent, working with the Workflow team. She has 5 years of working experience in Ruby on Rails and Java. Recently, she has been focusing on front-end technologies like React and Redux.

Ceri Shaw has been developing software for almost 15 years in a variety of languages from C++ to Ruby. She is currently a Team Lead at FreeAgent where she leads the workflow team in developing new features for their cloud-based accounting software. She loves the challenge of figuring out how to develop the right software and much to her own surprise really enjoys being a technical manager as well.

About our sponsor

FreeAgent is one of the leading online accounting platforms in the UK with over 50,000 customers and continued fast growth. We’re on a mission to make businesses happier and more successful by putting them in control of their finances. Our app is already loved by thousands of freelancers, small business owners and accountants.

We’re looking to hire senior software engineers to join our developers, designers and domain experts. Depending on the team you join, you could be working on accounting and compliance features such as payroll and self-assessment, re-imagining commonly used areas of the app such as banking, or improving the user experience from the website through to subscription.

About our venue

Our meetup will take place at our venue, Union St.

After the meetup, we’ll be heading to The Devonshire Cat for drinks, food and chat.