Forum AMA with Tim Drew, Freetrade Director of Engineering, Thu 11th Nov at 9.30 PM

Freetrade Chat đŸ”„
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[this question has disappeared from above because the user was banned - I believe he had 20+ likes on the Q, so I’ll try and remember the jist of it]

Can you tell us a bit about what the crypto feature will look & feel like for users? And could you give us an indication of when it will be launched? Please don’t say “soon”.

Can you tell us what the other “exciting initiatives” are that the team said you’re working on?

Thanks

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Whats the rationale for an office in Australia?

Considering that the strong majority of the engineering team is in the UK, having 2 offices can impact the productivity of the team in terms of releasing new products?

Thanks

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D’you call that a knife? :australia:

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gm from Australia! :coffee::kangaroo::australia:

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Got to start with the hardest hitting question first. Vegemite all the way, slathered on nice and thick too!

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Tech stack: Based in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), heavy usage of autoscaling serverless tech like Cloud Functions, allows us to keep the operational burden low.

Monitoring is largely performed using GCPs inbuilt tooling, they provide logging, metrics, dashboards etc.

Re are we still serverless, largely yes, although we’re very pragmatic about our technology choices, picking the right tool for the task and also for the stage we’re at as a team. This recent blog post from one of our engineers for instance, it covers our recent adoption of Kubernetes for a use case that it was well suited to.

Re cold starts, it is definitely something you need to manage, but it is manageable. We’ve have success with keeping a sensible minimum number of instances always running so cold starts are infrequent, and bundling a light function so any cold starts that do happen have minimal impact.

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You get used to it :upside_down_face:

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We have a very strong culture of automated testing, these are tests that run automatically before every release to confirm that everything is working as expected.

One of the best-practices I’ve found wrt to rectifying bugs is to write a new test that covers the situation before you fix the bug itself. If that test case goes from failing to passing, then not only do you know you’ve fixed the bug, but if that issue ever rears its head again your new automated test will catch it before release.

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I might have to phone a friend on this one :telephone_receiver:, have flagged it up internally with our engineering team to see if this is expected or unexpected.

It might be up to the OS itself, selectively clearing data only if the device is running out of memory overall. But as I said, I’ll have to ask the experts!

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I’m pleased to say that we have the luxury of being picky in our search for our next CTO :blush:

We have had outstanding success in hiring engineering leadership this year, with multiple new eng managers joining us across all our seniority levels. We might not have a CTO at present, but we are definitely in a stronger position than we were at the start of the year, so we can afford to wait for the right person to take that top role.

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The reasons are many and varied :slightly_smiling_face:

Primarily though, our goal is not to stop at just the UK or even just Europe. Freetrade is going global and to support that we want teams in geographically diverse locations who work in similar timezones to the customers they’re supporting and the markets they’re providing access to.

Side note: one of the small perks from a purely engineering perspective is that we can establish a follow-the-sun support model. This means UK engineers no longer need to get paged at 2am if an alarm happens to go off, the Australian office is awake and online and can take a look at it whilst the UK team sleeps soundly (and vice versa) :sleeping:

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Can’t tell you anything specific about the timing of crypto launch, but we are actively working on it. Look & feel will be similar to the existing Freetrade trading experience but with the obvious difference of 24/7 trading (see my previous comment about follow-the-sun support models, this is when it gets really important!)

Wrt other exciting initiatives, the one close to my heart is prepping for an in-country launch in Australia. I want my Aussie family and friends to be able to use Freetrade!

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Are there any plans to show the average purchase share price in usd instead of gbp? It makes it quite hard to work out what your avg share price is when it’s not shown in usd

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  1. This is changing rapidly, hiring has really been accelerating in this year and we’re adding loads of talented people across all teams.
  2. The broad trends are that it will probably get bigger and more specialised as we scale up our teams and broaden our product offering. A single team that used to look after 3 things will probably split out into 3 distinct teams that each own a single thing and make sure it’s as good as it could possibly be.
  3. As mentioned in 1. I think we’ve turned a corner here, recruiting is going really well.
  4. I don’t! My engineers are all based in Australia and we get together in-office multiple times a week.
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Thanks for all the questions, looks like I’ve run out of time.

Apologies to anyone I didn’t manage to respond to but I’ve got to run for the morning bus :bus:
:man_running:

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Thanks again to @timdrew and for everyone who answered the questions!

Stay tuned for our next AMA :eyes:

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Thank you @timdrew

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He didn’t get round to my question which was disheartening though! Very interested in the multi-cloud strategy piece

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multi cloud, as it mixing Google / Azure / AWS for extra resilience?

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That’s right yeah and a major hot topic in fintech

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