Micro-batching Event Data Into Amazon Redshift
Data is at the heart of our business. We use data to make business critical decisions on a daily basis. It is important that this data is not only accurate but also available when required. Traditionally reports would be generated at a set schedule which made it difficult to decide on next steps in a timely fashion. New technologies like Amazon Kinesis Data Streams enable us to generate these reports… Continue reading
Surviving your first winter as a remote worker
Many of FreeAgent’s engineering team work remotely, spread all around the UK, generally visiting our Edinburgh office once a quarter. (FreeAgent’s remote engineering team - blue arrows show full-time staff, yellow show contractors.) I joined FreeAgent in April 2018 and this was my first experience of being a remote worker. Even though I’d sometimes been able to do one day a week working from home in previous roles, the reality… Continue reading
Separating job applicants in multiple dimensions
The team I work in at FreeAgent is achieving great things - from rolling out a new Business Intelligence tool, to working on machine learning models to improve our product. With so many ideas but not enough time to action them, we recently advertised a number of roles to expand our team. FreeAgent is a superb place to work, and the roles are a real opportunity for someone to achieve… Continue reading
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From Finder to Sublime Text
At FreeAgent we work on Macs with a good number of us using iTerm2 and some using Sublime Text. Often I find myself in Finder needing to open a file or folder in Sublime Text. The unfun way is to go Finder -> Services -> Open New iTerm Tab Here and then once that opens type subl .. There's a couple other ways to do this that are more fun… Continue reading
What We Value – Writing Code At FreeAgent
Writing software is hard. The problems we’re 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 we’ve 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 you’ll 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 Eileen’s 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. Motivation… Continue reading
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 isn’t 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 don’t 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