How to survive imposter syndrome in your software engineering internship
Hi there! My name is Fiona, and I am an intern at FreeAgent. I got my offer and dodged returning to the monotony of bar work that I endured last summer. However, I was only in my second year of studying Computer Science. How was I chosen from what must have been a sea of applicants? They must have overlooked someone! Had I lucked out? In hindsight, this was a… Continue reading
Challenge Accepted: Our Weekly Looker Challenge
We wanted to improve our stakeholders’ Looker skills Here at FreeAgent we use Looker as our business intelligence tool. It’s used by over 150 stakeholders across the organisation, of which over 100 are active on a monthly basis. To unlock Looker’s full potential, we’d like those stakeholders to be better equipped to explore the data using Looker’s range of features, rather than simply viewing a chart that somebody else has… Continue reading
Meet our women in engineering (Part 2)
The second of an occasional series, where we ask some of our women in engineering to share their experiences of working at FreeAgent: What was your career journey like before coming to FreeAgent? My academic background is in the Humanities, but I spent years working in web publishing. This work wasn’t particularly techy, as I was using a CMS to publish content to sites. I was curious about the stuff… Continue reading
Meet our women in engineering
In the first of an occasional series, we asked some of our women in engineering to share their experiences of working at FreeAgent: What was your career journey like before coming to FreeAgent? I'm a career switcher, from children's book publishing to software development. My first tech job in 2015 was a junior-friendly place where I learned TSQL on the job. Then, my second dev job was back in publishing,… Continue reading
Hosting Women Who Code Edinburgh
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… Continue reading
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
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
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
Say hello to some of our women in engineering!
We celebrated International Women in Engineering Day earlier this week with a video featuring some of our own. This inspired a few more of us to mark the occasion and say hello. What’s exciting is that there are many different routes to a career in engineering. Say hello to... Katrina 👋 Who inspires you in the tech world? I think I've been genuinely lucky to start out at FreeAgent. Over… 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