Mindfulness with GitHub
I was a researcher in chemistry in my previous career, so I have a habit of labelling everything. It is important in chemistry to be organised; you don’t want to mix unknown liquids in unlabeled beakers. Can you guess why? BOOM! I apply this habit in every area of my life. Now, everything has a place and is clearly labelled. I have a place for vertically striped socks and a… Continue reading
My experience as an Analytics Intern
I was really excited to begin interning at FreeAgent and after 9 weeks in the Data Analytics team I feel I’ve learnt a lot about working in a team inside a company, and about the culture here. I thought I would write a bit about how it was getting set up, working on my project and communicating my findings to the rest of the company. Onboarding/set-up There were a lot… Continue reading
The 4 SQL queries you need to debug Redshift performance
This blog provides four useful SQL snippets you can use to debug poor Redshift performance. Continue reading
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