Last week FreeAgent hosted Women Who Code Edinburgh. We welcomed more than 20 people from a range of backgrounds and locations – due to COVID restrictions we had to host online this time. After an introduction to Women Who Code, we gave three presentations.
I gave a talk on Agile Estimation, explaining how Agile estimation works, estimating using relative rather than absolute measures such as time, and the benefits of doing so. The talk also covered tools, techniques and best practice, and it was great to get some interesting questions around this and how people could apply what they’d heard in their various teams.
Lea Whitelaw, one of our Business Intelligence Analysts, gave a technical talk about the implementation of a code-linter for our BI tool, Looker. The talk covered the challenges and difficulties that came up during this project and the problem solving process which led to them being overcome. It also covered how the problems in the project could have been identified earlier in the process, and the lessons that were learned from the project as a whole.
Finally we showed a video on “My Journey Into Tech”. Four engineers from FreeAgent described how they got into tech or returned to it. Among many women engineers at FreeAgent, these four individual stories range from returning from a career break for family reasons, switching careers from events planning, journalism or publishing careers, and boot camp experiences.
We’ll continue to collaborate with Women Who Code, with the aim to host in person meet-ups in future. Aside from this, we have a number of STEM Ambassadors both in Edinburgh and across the UK, getting involved in a variety of activities such as mentoring GCSE students, giving talks about their role, and online masterclasses. If you’re interested in finding out more about us and our open roles, come and see us at:
- University of Edinburgh Careers in Tech & Data 2022 on Wednesday 9th March where we are participating in a panel on recruitment
- Data Talent on Tuesday 15th March
- Design It Build It 21st – 22nd March
- Level Up on Saturday 26th March
We look forward to seeing you at an event soon!