My Summer @ FreeAgent
Hi, Iām Struan. Nice to meet you. Iāve been working at FreeAgent over the summer as an Engineering Intern within the Workflow team and to round off my time here, Iāve written an Engineering Blog post about my internship, covering the main projects that Iāve been working on over the past three months. The Beginning My time at FreeAgent started off with meeting the Workflow team, my team for the… Continue reading
DevBots, squirrels and bouncing emailsāāājust another internās summer
Over the last three months, I have had the wonderful opportunity to join FreeAgentās Workflow team as an Engineering Intern. As the internship draws to an all-too-soon close, Iāll look back at some of the things Iāve been able to participate in this summer. Getting going When I entered the office on the first Monday morning, I was introduced to the other members of Workflow, where we were promptly whisked… Continue reading
Summer in the city: my data science internship at FreeAgent
During a wet and windy January afternoon, I was indulging in fantasies about summer, hot weather and holidays. Pulling me back to reality was the realisation that Iām not some jet-setting socialite but a university student lacking in work experience and fast approaching the end of their academic career! I only had one year before Iād be forced to crawl from under the comfort blanket that is student loans, friendly… Continue reading
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Dealing with dirty data: useful functions for data cleaning in R
In this blog post, Iāll explain how to use some simple R-based data cleaning solutions (mostly in the ātidyverseā package1) to address the most common dataset errors with the help of my favourite analogy: the untidy kitchen! NB: There are a plethora of valuable data cleaning tools in other software and even within R there are many different tools available. While the approach that I describe here is not necessarily… Continue reading
Clean house: clear mind. Clean data: clear findings.
Soon after settling in at FreeAgent and getting to grips with my role as a data science intern, I got the opportunity to present some of the data that I had been working on at a ātown hallā, a company-wide weekly meeting where everyone gets together to present their work, share news and pitch ideas. The data I presented was attitudinal survey data from accountancy practices that had contracts with… Continue reading
Castles, canals and coffee: my first week as a FreeAgent data science intern
My regular job is as a PhD student specialising in veterinary biology but this summer I have an amazing opportunity to be a data science intern at FreeAgent. If you are wondering why a biologist came to work at an accountancy software company, this is because of the particular branch of biology that I study: āepidemiologyā. An epidemiologist typically uses data to understand āthe distribution and determinants of health-related states… Continue reading
Rails migration aliases with fzf
Ever find yourself re-running Rails migrations? Up, down, redo-ing etc. Have you forgotten that long VERSION number again? Or what the migration actually migrates? These handy aliases just might be for you. I've been running individual migrations a lot recently, so I took some time to set up these aliases with fzf (a command-line fuzzy finder). rdbm # bundle exec rake db:migrate (no auto-completion) rdbmu # bundle exec rake db:migrate:up… Continue reading
Remote Desks (Revisited!)
Back in 2015 we joined in with an internet custom by posting pictures of our desks in all their glorious variety. Now that it's 2018, National Work from Home Day and a few years since that post, a followup is in order. Some folks have moved, others have joined and we don't often get to look at one another's desksāusually we get to see what's behind them on video calls!… Continue reading
Ruby 2.5: How’s That Backtrace looking?
Itās Christmas night, the air is cool and the stars are unseen through the heavy cloud. Children have left tablet and a nip of whisky out for Santa, and carrots out for the reindeer. One of the children wakes up! Rushing out of bed, she heads to the living room, curious to see if she can catch Santa and reindeer in the act of present delivery. When she gets there,… Continue reading
Ruby 2.5: Not Blocking My Rescue
Rescuing specific exceptions excessively can cause problems, but if you've ever had need to rescue within a do/end block, you might have found yourself using wordy syntax. Ruby 2.5 has a solution for you. In Ruby 2.5, weāll get a little syntactic sugar for handling exceptions inside do/end blocks. You can see the feature discussion on Rubyās Redmine instance. If youāve ever used the shorthand for rescuing inside a method… Continue reading