What We Value āĀ Writing Code At FreeAgent
Writing software is hard. The problems weāre trying to solve are generally not trivial. They will have caveats and edge cases. They will rely on unreliable dependencies. The problem may evolve and the solution may need to be tweaked. The solution weāve carefully crafted might not have taken into consideration something that later seems obvious. The problem might even change entirely. Continue reading
Have your butler do the de-linting
Lots of our infrastructure is managed by Puppet, the open source configuration management tool that uses its own domain specific language (DSL) to describe how services, files and systems should look. The DSL was inspired by Nagios configuration files, so youāll find lots of nested blocks under curly braces, indentation, groups of parameters assigned with => separators, all of which can begin to look messy in a large manifest, as… Continue reading
FreeAgent is now on Rails 5.2!
As of Monday, 24th of September 2018 FreeAgent is now running on the latest version of Rails. We were inspired by Eileenās blog post about how GitHub upgraded from Rails 3.2 to 5.2 and we wanted to share with you the challenges we faced and how we managed to overcome them. We faced similar challenges to GitHub and we believe it is worth reiterating them to highlight their significance. Ā Motivation… Continue reading
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Wondering where the weeks went: a reminiscent reflection of my FreeAgent internship
It just seems like yesterday when I was settling in at FreeAgent and writing a blog about my first week as a FreeAgent data science intern. Yet here I am, having finished my internship and remembering all of the good times I had. Outside of my internship at FreeAgent, I am a PhD student specialising in veterinary biology, so the last 13 weeks have been a steep learning curve into… Continue reading
Accurately ascertaining attitudes: designing unbiased survey questions
It would be great if we knew exactly what our customers thought so that we could adapt our products and improve our performance. However, it isnāt possible to read the minds of our customers, so surveys are a popular alternative to understand their attitudes. Yet, if the answers recorded on surveys donāt truly reflect the attitudes of the customers, how can we really know how to improve? This blog post… Continue reading
Sourcing a suitable sample: understanding selection bias in survey data
During my time at FreeAgent, I have been analysing attitudinal customer survey data to predict their behaviour. Getting to the bottom of how exactly this data was collected has helped me to understand the data and has given me a few ideas about how the data could be collected in the future. This blog focuses on how we choose who is selected to take part in surveys: a process is… Continue reading
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
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