How I prepare for a tech job interview
You’ve updated your CV, applied for a job in tech and been offered an interview. Fantastic! But what next? Preparing for interviews is time consuming and can feel daunting, particularly in the earlier stages of your career. I’ve found that having a regimented process for this preparation can reduce stress and save valuable time. In this post I’m going to outline my own process and provide some examples of what… 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
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
A day in the life of a Web Analyst
Hi, I’m Lana and I’m a Web Analyst within the Analytics team here at FreeAgent. I primarily look after our Google platform products such as Google Analytics 360, Google Optimize, Google Data Studio and Google Tag Manager. When I tell people my job title, usually the next question I get is ‘So what is it you actually do then?’ To help answer this question, I decided to spend a day… Continue reading
Six years of data science and analytics interns at FreeAgent
It’s hard to believe we’ve been running internships in our data teams for six years now, and we’re about to start recruitment for the seventh time. Things have changed a little since our first intern started, as last year saw more than four times as many staff in the wider team and our first remote internship during the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve always tended to think of our internships as a… Continue reading
Return of the intern
A year on from my first data science internship at FreeAgent, I’m about to start my second one, and I’m getting ready for my second first day. It’s different this time though. Aside from the fact that I am now a fully fledged graduate (scary!), this internship is going to be based entirely within my living room, as the entire company is now working remotely. I have never worked remotely… Continue reading
What is a Business Intelligence Analyst?
The term Business Intelligence Analyst (or BI Analyst for short) can be a confusing one. Broadly speaking, the role of a BI Analyst can overlap with lots of other job titles that you might see out in the wild, such as: Data AnalystData ScientistInsight AnalystProduct AnalystMarketing AnalystCommercial AnalystReporting AnalystMI AnalystWeb AnalystCRM/Customer Analyst In general - and especially in the data world - job titles can often be inconsistent and subjective.… Continue reading
Transaction Taxonomy: Spending the Summer Studying SVMs
A company faces some unavoidably arduous tasks when taking control of their finances. One such task, which currently takes up a lot of time for our users, is explaining bank transactions. This is the process of assigning an accounting category to transactions, which is important both for internal reports generated by FreeAgent and for external submissions, for example to HMRC. At the end of June FreeAgent launched a suite of… Continue reading
Uprooting the Binary Tree
You’re a talented software engineer looking for your next position. Maybe you’re eyeing the FAANGs so you start researching how they do their technical interviews and you discover they like to ask algorithm-type questions - Reverse a linked list in place, Print the kth level of Pascal’s Triangle, Does string contain substring - and have you design Dropbox, Twitter, or some other system of their choosing. Then you apply to… Continue reading