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Grinding Gears

Tales of code crunching from the FreeAgent Engineering team

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How to boost your confidence as a beginner software engineer

Posted by Magdalena Veleva on August 8, 2022

Every engineer has questioned at least once in their life whether they are skilled enough for their chosen field. I experienced these doubts when I started my computer science degree at university, and despite the fact that I got through the first three years successfully, I still wasn’t fully confident in my abilities when I started my internship at FreeAgent.  However, this is entirely normal. Every engineer faces challenges on… Continue reading

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An introduction to object-oriented programming

Posted by Dale Molenaar on August 3, 2022

Object-oriented programming, or OOP, is a programming paradigm centred around the concept of objects. This article will aim to provide a basic understanding of objects, classes, OOP principles and various other concepts within the paradigm. Code examples will be mediated in the Ruby programming language, which is an example of an object-oriented language. In Ruby, any value is an object, even data types like String and Integer, which are often… Continue reading

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What a data science degree doesn’t teach you

Posted by Anna Cunningham on July 28, 2022

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 ā€˜if it works… it works!’ Learning to code can seem very daunting. There are so many resources and even languages. Where… Continue reading

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Getting started with Jupyter Notebookļæ¼

Posted by Ferdinand Becker on July 12, 2022

Jupyter Notebook is a development environment that runs in your web browser and can be used with several languages, including R and Python. In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the benefits of using Jupyter Notebook and how to start using it with Python.  Benefits of Jupyter Notebook Chunking code into cells Instead of having to write code in large flat files, developers can use Jupyter Notebook to… Continue reading

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A 12-step guide to AWS cost optimisation

Posted by Steven Williamson on June 16, 2022

This article outlines the pragmatic approach that we’ve followed here at FreeAgent in our first 18 months of using AWS to increase our cost efficiency. Using this approach, we’ve already cut our AWS spend by 50%, and we estimate we can save another 30% a year by implementing further efficiencies. Here are 12 things we’ve learned along the way. Our strategy 1. Don’t optimise for cost too early We fully… Continue reading

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In full flow: moving from Jenkins to Actions – Part 1

Posted by Daniel Holz on June 10, 2022

At FreeAgent a recent project to move our Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) workflows from Jenkins to GitHub Actions has brought some real benefits. In this post we’ll cover the background of our CI/CD pipelines, why we wanted to change how they run, and how we decided on GitHub Actions. In the next post we’ll cover how we handled the migration, and how we solved the challenges we encountered. But let’s… Continue reading

How we structure our data teams at FreeAgent

Posted by Ed Berry on June 3, 2022

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 ā€˜Data Engineer’Data Analytics are part of the Engineering orgNo one has… Continue reading

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10 tips and tricks for a good intern job application

Posted by Lana Turnbull on May 16, 2022

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 ā€˜professional’ roles that they are applying for. As such they might not be… Continue reading

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The three skills you need to be a Data Analyst, and how to get them – Part 3

Posted by Rob Brown on May 10, 2022

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

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The three skills you need to be a Data Analyst, and how to get them – Part 2

Posted by Rob Brown on May 10, 2022

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

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