Down the Ruby Mine, Part I: The code insertion trinity
Hey there, my name’s Sam and I am one of four software engineering interns working at FreeAgent over the summer. This is my first time writing in Ruby and I’ve had a great time exploring the language. As developers I believe it’s important to develop a fundamental understanding of the core of a language, even when its supplemented by a feature-rich framework like Rails. Over the next few weeks I’ll… Continue reading
Deriving and verifying the uncertainty on conversion rate predictions
For the past few weeks I’ve been working on building a machine learning model that can estimate the probability that a customer will convert from the free trial to a paid subscriber. In practice, I combine the predictions from this model for cohorts of companies, which are defined by their acquisition channel and acquisition month, and so a method is required for calculating the conversion rate uncertainties for each cohort.… Continue reading
Being a Data Science Intern at FreeAgent: The first month
As the end of my second year at university was approaching I knew I needed to get some real-world experience to help me get a clearer vision of what career path I want to follow in the future. The best way of achieving this was getting a summer internship. After reading some blog posts of past Interns at FreeAgent (who knew I would be writing one myself a few months… Continue reading
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Settling in for summer: my data science internship
The application process After having the fantastic and inevitable university-student-in-their-penultimate-year realisation that I’m almost one year away from graduation and do not feel adequately prepared, I decided that an internship could be a great way to up my experience and knowledge before my final year. Data science, specifically, is what I was looking for as I’m interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence, and I thought a data science internship… Continue reading
Shaving yaks – problem solving in Dev Platform
Although I usually work in Support Engineering here at FreeAgent, I was recently given the opportunity to spend a six-week cycle working in the Dev Platform team. The technical aspect of the Support Engineer role is what drives me; I love to take a problem, dig into the source code and figure out how to solve it. The work in Dev Platform promised to be even more technical so I… Continue reading
How to count what counts
At FreeAgent we’re building a new platform to allow our teams to explore their data and glean new insights from it. The platform is built using Looker on top of Amazon Redshift, and so far it’s been enthusiastically received by the teams that use it. However, the process of building up the platform and driving adoption hasn’t been entirely straightforward. There has been a recurring issue that we’ve have had… Continue reading
Why we love accessibility (and you should too!)
On 16th May it’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a day to “get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access/inclusion and people with different disabilities”. At FreeAgent, our mission is to make small businesses happier and more successful by putting them in control of their finances. A big part of that mission is building software that is accessible and inclusive, so that we can help as many people as possible,… Continue reading
Introducing the Band – James Bell
The Product and Engineering organisation at FreeAgent is now a broad group of over 90 engineers (of various flavours), designers, data scientists, product managers, UX specialists, business analysts, managers and testers. And we're still growing apace! We thought it would be fun to interview some of the team to share a bit of their career history and to provide our readers with some behind-the-scenes insight into what goes on day… Continue reading
Micro-batching Event Data Into Amazon Redshift
Data is at the heart of our business. We use data to make business critical decisions on a daily basis. It is important that this data is not only accurate but also available when required. Traditionally reports would be generated at a set schedule which made it difficult to decide on next steps in a timely fashion. New technologies like Amazon Kinesis Data Streams enable us to generate these reports… Continue reading
Surviving your first winter as a remote worker
Many of FreeAgent’s engineering team work remotely, spread all around the UK, generally visiting our Edinburgh office once a quarter. (FreeAgent’s remote engineering team - blue arrows show full-time staff, yellow show contractors.) I joined FreeAgent in April 2018 and this was my first experience of being a remote worker. Even though I’d sometimes been able to do one day a week working from home in previous roles, the reality… Continue reading