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
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
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