Testing Child Processes in Ruby
I was recently writing a piece of code that we wanted to act as a supervisor of child processes. We wanted to ask this supervisor the following “Hello there, would you mind running this task in a child process? Thanks!”. From here the supervisor would create a process, keep track of it so we can stop it if necessary, and run the given piece of code in it. This supervisor… Continue reading
Moving 100,000 customers from co-lo data centres to the cloud. With zero downtime.
Running a SaaS app in AWS in 2020 is, in itself, not a particularly remarkable thing. Migrating a complex Rails app that is used daily by over 100,000 customers to an entirely different infrastructure, introducing a new underlying architecture, and doing so without customer downtime, really is something special. In this article we take a look behind the curtain to see how we achieved this recently at FreeAgent. It's almost… Continue reading
Answering bigger questions with BigQuery
Over the past few weeks, we’ve configured BigQuery to enable us to combine our Google Analytics (GA) front-end data with our internal back-end data. In this post I’m going to talk about why we needed to do this, how we went about it and what we are hoping to achieve as a result. What’s the problem? Historically, two separate systems have been used at FreeAgent to track, store and analyse… Continue reading
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Empowering our practices: Take 2
‘How can we use our data to understand and empower our accountancy practice partners?’ This is the question that I posed in my previous blog about delivering practice insights last summer. This question was the foundation for my project last year and is the one I came back to continue answering this year. To recap how the project was left at the end of last summer; I had created three… Continue reading
Breathing New Life into Dormant Code
In the Tax Engineering team at FreeAgent we’re currently working on adding Corporation Tax and Final Accounts filing to our application as we continue our mission to help our customers relax about tax. We’ve been working on these features since June and recently released the Final Accounts report and the CT600 form, but what you might not know is that work on this project originally began back in 2017. So… Continue reading
Can’t someone else do it? Automating Looker Housekeeping in Two Days
This blog discusses how, through successful planning and design, we were able to automate some Looker housekeeping tasks in less than 2 days. Continue reading
Return of the intern
A year on from my first data science internship at FreeAgent, I’m about to start my second one, and I’m getting ready for my second first day. It’s different this time though. Aside from the fact that I am now a fully fledged graduate (scary!), this internship is going to be based entirely within my living room, as the entire company is now working remotely. I have never worked remotely… Continue reading
How we publish user events for 100,000 customers
The FreeAgent application is currently used by more than 100,000 companies. When users send their invoices, explain their bank transactions and do any other action to take care of their business, these actions are recorded automatically. We record them in different systems and for different purposes. One of the systems where we record actions like these is an event system and these records are called events. Events contain information about… Continue reading
What is a Business Intelligence Analyst?
The term Business Intelligence Analyst (or BI Analyst for short) can be a confusing one. Broadly speaking, the role of a BI Analyst can overlap with lots of other job titles that you might see out in the wild, such as: Data AnalystData ScientistInsight AnalystProduct AnalystMarketing AnalystCommercial AnalystReporting AnalystMI AnalystWeb AnalystCRM/Customer Analyst In general - and especially in the data world - job titles can often be inconsistent and subjective.… Continue reading
Transaction Taxonomy: Spending the Summer Studying SVMs
A company faces some unavoidably arduous tasks when taking control of their finances. One such task, which currently takes up a lot of time for our users, is explaining bank transactions. This is the process of assigning an accounting category to transactions, which is important both for internal reports generated by FreeAgent and for external submissions, for example to HMRC. At the end of June FreeAgent launched a suite of… Continue reading