What a data science degree doesn’t teach you
When I enrolled on my data science master’s degree I had limited statistical and coding knowledge. This course was designed to teach these skills from the bottom up. Having now worked as a software engineering intern, I have come to realise a lot of things were missed. Moving beyond ‘if it works… it works!’ Learning to code can seem very daunting. There are so many resources and even languages. Where… Continue reading
How we structure our data teams at FreeAgent
Since joining FreeAgent back in April I’ve been both impressed and interested with how the Data organisation is structured. I’ve come from an enterprise world where you have lots of Data Engineers, a team of dedicated Data Architects and a separate Business Intelligence org. A few things that immediately struck me at FreeAgent were: No one has the title ‘Data Engineer’Data Analytics are part of the Engineering orgNo one has… Continue reading
10 tips and tricks for a good intern job application
We’ve recently completed the hiring for this year's cohort of summer interns and as a result we’ve processed hundreds of applications; just across our data teams we had over 600 this year! For many of these applicants, who tend to still be at university or have recently graduated, this is likely to be one of the first ‘professional’ roles that they are applying for. As such they might not be… Continue reading
The three skills you need to be a Data Analyst, and how to get them – Part 3
In the third blog in the series, we discuss the skills you need to become a Data Analyst, this time covering Data Evanglism. Continue reading
The three skills you need to be a Data Analyst, and how to get them – Part 2
In the second blog in the series, we discuss the skills you need to become a Data Analyst, this time covering Data Analysis. Continue reading
The three skills you need to be a Data Analyst, and how to get them – Part 1
In the first blog in the series, we discuss the skills you need to become a Data Analyst, this time covering Data Engineering. Continue reading
The legendary data warehouse application
In spring 2014, I created an internal Ruby on Rails app called data-warehouse. In this blog post I’m going to describe what it was, how it came to be and why, against what would appear to be all reasonable logic, it became the central part of our data infrastructure for about eight years. Continue reading
Training Hugging Face models in parallel with SageMaker
In this post I'll describe how we train our Hugging Face models in a fraction of the time with a data parallel approach. Continue reading
Using data to understand the effects of a four day working week
As you may have already heard, FreeAgent implemented a four-day week throughout the summer this year as a ‘thank you’ for the employees’ contributions during the pandemic and a year of working from home. Whilst Pat George’s blog post talks about measuring the success of the four-day week with “job satisfaction, business objectives and personal stress levels”, as an analyst, I wanted to see if I could find less anecdotal… Continue reading
Fine-Tuning BERT for multiclass categorisation with Amazon SageMaker
This post describes our approach to fine-tuning a BERT model for multiclass categorisation with Hugging Face and Amazon SageMaker. Continue reading