Being an Introvert in a Meeting
A toolbox to get your voice heard Introvert: a typically reserved or quiet person who tends to be introspective and more comfortable with a small group of people. Context This November, Lea [1], Lana [2] and myself went to the Women of Silicon Roundabout conference. There were a few talks around developing your soft skills to be better in the world of tech. One talk that particularly interested me was… Continue reading
Using data to understand the effects of a four day working week
As you may have already heard, FreeAgent implemented a four-day week throughout the summer this year as a ‘thank you’ for the employees’ contributions during the pandemic and a year of working from home. Whilst Pat George’s blog post talks about measuring the success of the four-day week with “job satisfaction, business objectives and personal stress levels”, as an analyst, I wanted to see if I could find less anecdotal… Continue reading
Here’s to Thriday
The last eighteen months have been very hard. You know that, you’ve lived it. We’ve all done what we can in order to get by. A couple months ago FreeAgent decided to help us do that by giving us Fridays off for the months of July and August. I admit when it was first announced in our weekly Town Hall I didn’t listen to the rest of the meeting; I… Continue reading
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Fine-Tuning BERT for multiclass categorisation with Amazon SageMaker
This post describes our approach to fine-tuning a BERT model for multiclass categorisation with Hugging Face and Amazon SageMaker. Continue reading
Software engineering: 5 things they don’t teach you at university
Introduction Over the past couple of months, I’ve been working as an intern software engineer in the Banking Integrations team here at FreeAgent. Before I started, I had just finished the second year of my Computer Science degree at the University of Birmingham. Whilst university taught me a multitude of skills, there are many that can only be truly gained from working in a company. I’d like to share some… Continue reading
The Value of an Internship at FreeAgent
Coming from a chemistry background, I’d never have thought that the skills I was learning at university could be transferred to working as an analytics intern at FreeAgent, but this summer I proved myself wrong. After spending a lot of time taking courses in Python and SQL with the Code First: Girls charity through a year of lockdown, this internship was the perfect opportunity for me to develop everything I… Continue reading
New wine, old skins – how FreeAgent blends existing tools and fresh approaches
According to the parable in Matthew’s gospel, “no-one pours new wine into old wineskins – otherwise, the wine would burst the wine-skins, and both would be ruined.” So, coming into FreeAgent as an intern, I wondered – would FreeAgent prefer the new wine in the new skins or the old wine in the old skins? Would they satisfy the stereotype of the tech start-up, move fast and break things, trip… Continue reading
I Came, I Saw, I Categorised
It’s been a wild time this summer at FreeAgent: four-day weeks, Edinburgh flooding, people gearing up to return to the office, and in the meantime you have me, the remote software engineering intern, working away in his little corner of the FreeAgent world. But before all that, who is this wee guy? Well, I’m Fraser Dempster and I spent 12 weeks of my summer at FreeAgent. Excuse me, I'm lost… Continue reading
Lessons from my first software engineering internship
I started university two years ago with minimal programming knowledge and only a few lessons making Pong in Scratch under my belt. So in the beginning of my Computer Science degree, I spent a lot of time playing catch-up. My experience here at FreeAgent is what has finally caught me up. Unlike in most internships, it was business as usual from day one for me, rather than one big project.… Continue reading
Bank Transaction Entity Detection with AWS Comprehend
Introduction For the past year, FreeAgent has been running a machine learning model in production that categorises customer bank transactions. This model takes transaction descriptions and transaction amounts as inputs, and attempts to predict the corresponding accounting category. This summer, I joined the data science team with the more specific goal of increasing model generalisation, which would allow it to make predictions for a larger fraction of incoming transactions. One… Continue reading