Down the Ruby Mine, Part II: Rubyās seemingly illogical logical operators
Hello there, my nameās Sam and Iām one of the Summer 2019 Engineering Interns at FreeAgent. As part of my time here Iām writing a series of blog posts on Ruby language features. If youāre a first time Down the Ruby Mine reader then donāt fret, because the posts arenāt dependant on each other. However, if you are interested, you can find the first post here. Today weāll be exploring… Continue reading
Delivering Practice Insights: My internship at FreeAgent
The phrase āpractice insightsā was something that I heard very often in my first couple of weeks at FreeAgent, between wrapping my head around the data model and trying hard to remember everyone's names. The reason I mention it in the context of the first couple of weeks is because at that point I didnāt fully know what it meant. Of course I knew what the words meant, and I… Continue reading
Down the Ruby Mine, Part I: The code insertion trinity
Hey there, my nameās Sam and I am one of four software engineering interns working at FreeAgent over the summer. This is my first time writing in Ruby and Iāve had a great time exploring the language. As developers I believe itās important to develop a fundamental understanding of the core of a language, even when its supplemented by a feature-rich framework like Rails. Over the next few weeks Iāll… Continue reading
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Deriving and verifying the uncertainty on conversion rate predictions
For the past few weeks Iāve been working on building a machine learning model that can estimate the probability that a customer will convert from the free trial to a paid subscriber. In practice, I combine the predictions from this model for cohorts of companies, which are defined by their acquisition channel and acquisition month, and so a method is required for calculating the conversion rate uncertainties for each cohort.… Continue reading
Being a Data Science Intern at FreeAgent: The first month
As the end of my second year at university was approaching I knew I needed to get some real-world experience to help me get a clearer vision of what career path I want to follow in the future. The best way of achieving this was getting a summer internship. After reading some blog posts of past Interns at FreeAgent (who knew I would be writing one myself a few months… Continue reading
Settling in for summer: my data science internship
The application process After having the fantastic and inevitable university-student-in-their-penultimate-year realisation that Iām almost one year away from graduation and do not feel adequately prepared, I decided that an internship could be a great way to up my experience and knowledge before my final year. Data science, specifically, is what I was looking for as Iām interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence, and I thought a data science internship… Continue reading
Shaving yaks – problem solving in Dev Platform
Although I usually work in Support Engineering here at FreeAgent, I was recently given the opportunity to spend a six-week cycle working in the Dev Platform team. The technical aspect of the Support Engineer role is what drives me; I love to take a problem, dig into the source code and figure out how to solve it. The work in Dev Platform promised to be even more technical so I… Continue reading
How to count what counts
At FreeAgent weāre building a new platform to allow our teams to explore their data and glean new insights from it. The platform is built using Looker on top of Amazon Redshift, and so far itās been enthusiastically received by the teams that use it. However, the process of building up the platform and driving adoption hasnāt been entirely straightforward. There has been a recurring issue that weāve have had… Continue reading
Why we love accessibility (and you should too!)
On 16th May itās Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a day to āget everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access/inclusion and people with different disabilitiesā. At FreeAgent, our mission is to make small businesses happier and more successful by putting them in control of their finances. A big part of that mission is building software that is accessible and inclusive, so that we can help as many people as possible,… Continue reading
Introducing the Band ā 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