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
Bank Transaction Entity Detection with AWS Comprehend
Introduction For the past year, FreeAgent has been running a machine learning model in production that categorises customer bank transactions. This model takes transaction descriptions and transaction amounts as inputs, and attempts to predict the corresponding accounting category. This summer, I joined the data science team with the more specific goal of increasing model generalisation, which would allow it to make predictions for a larger fraction of incoming transactions. One… Continue reading
Control freaks: how we built our own version control for Matillion
We’ve all been there - it’s a couple of days or even the night before an important deadline and one of the following happens: You lose your memory stick with all your work on it and scramble to recreate it but can’t get it back to the way it was.You make some more ‘advancements’ to your work and suddenly everything is broken and you can’t seem to get it back… Continue reading