Starting from Home: Remote Data Science Internship at FreeAgent
Starting a data science internship at FreeAgent was going to be a completely new experience for me and I was super excited. It’s a lovely warm day in Edinburgh, Monday 1st of June, I’m standing in my kitchen looking out of the window and wondering what the next few months will hold for me. It’s 9.28am and my first meeting is supposed to start in 2 minutes. Am I going… Continue reading
Switching to Feature Testing with Headless Chrome
At FreeAgent, we run 45,000 tests on every code change to make sure that our rails monolith continues to work as expected. These include unit, integration, and acceptance tests. Recently, we switched from Capybara-webkit to Headless Chrome with Selenium for running JavaScript and acceptance tests. Why did we switch? Capybara-webkit has now been deprecated and uses an old version of webkit engine, so we had to look for alternatives. We… Continue reading
How I made personal development work for me
Taking regular time out to focus on self-improvement can have concrete benefits for both you and your organisation. These benefits could include becoming more confident in your role, getting that promotion, or helping you become a more collaborative and communicative team member. It surprises me that lots of people I speak to aren’t nearly as excited about personal developments as I am. If you feel guilty about taking time out… Continue reading
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Replatforming the iOS mobile app
It has been just over a year since we shipped our replatformed iOS app to great reviews and many happy customers. In this post I would like to take a look back at where we came from and how the FreeAgent mobile app is shaping up for the future. We started developing the mobile app way back in 2014. At the time the entire engineering team was ~20 people and… Continue reading
How we built the FreeAgent Furlough Calculator in a week
In light of the Coronavirus events, the UK Government put in place a few measures to help businesses during those uncertain times. At FreeAgent, we quickly adapt to help businesses during this crisis. Our goal is to keep you up-to-date with the government support available. HMRC’s Job Retention Scheme Announcement - allowing employers to furlough employees and claim 80% of their wages plus any National Insurance and pension contributions -… Continue reading
Working from Home: The desks of FreeAgent Engineering
FreeAgent has always been a remote friendly company. When the co-founders started building the company over a decade ago, they were in different parts of the UK. In ordinary times, roughly half of our Engineering team is remote and everyone else works from our lovely, though currently empty, office in Edinburgh. Four years ago we posted a handful of pictures of people’s engineering desks, and as the company has grown… Continue reading
How to Measure Pointless Things?
Here at FreeAgent we, like so many other workplaces around the world, have been adjusting to a fully remote setup over the past few weeks. Whilst a significant number of our company’s employees are permanently home-based, only one of our seven Analytics & Data Science team members is usually based away from our Edinburgh office. It has felt strange. We decided fairly quickly that we needed to create new opportunities… Continue reading
Tooled Up. A brief history of SaaS tools we’ve loved (and lost)
Distributed (remote) working has always been a foundation of the Engineering team at FreeAgent. Our entire company was founded as a distributed team and over the years we've managed to maintain a 50% distributed-to-office staff ratio in Engineering. The tools we use to work effectively as a distributed team have changed over the years, but there are a number of stalwarts that we've used since 2007 and still love today.… Continue reading
An Evolution of Bank Feeds: from Yodlee to Open Banking
We care a great deal about bank feeds. They provide the essential link between our users' FreeAgent accounts and their bank accounts, automatically importing transactions each day. From our customers' point of view they're probably the most valuable and most used feature of the software, so they're really important to us too. For many of our customers, the main purpose of using accounting software like FreeAgent is so they don't… Continue reading
On the road to real-time reporting with incremental data transfer
Reporting Data at FreeAgent We keep track of a range of customer behaviours in the FreeAgent application as a means to understand engagement and to formulate and measure our OKRs. Examples of this include support requests raised through our ticketing system, Zendesk, the scores and comments provided by our users during NPS surveys and event data detailing specific actions taken within the application. As a concrete example of the latter,… Continue reading