Search results for 'intern'
Control freaks: how we built our own version control for Matillion
We’ve all been there - it’s a couple of days or even the night before an important deadline and one of the following happens: You lose your memory stick with all your work on it and scramble to recreate it but can’t get it back to the way it was.You make some more ‘advancements’ to your work and suddenly everything is broken and you can’t seem to get it back… Continue reading
A day in the life of a Web Analyst
Hi, I’m Lana and I’m a Web Analyst within the Analytics team here at FreeAgent. I primarily look after our Google platform products such as Google Analytics 360, Google Optimize, Google Data Studio and Google Tag Manager. When I tell people my job title, usually the next question I get is ‘So what is it you actually do then?’ To help answer this question, I decided to spend a day… Continue reading
Unpacking Amazon ECS
The following post is a high-level description of Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Container Service (ECS), the relationship between its components, and how they can be used to deploy a web application. ECS is a fully managed container service. It is akin to Kubernetes, but ultimately it is simpler and has fewer moving parts. ECS offers the security, reliability and scalability that is customary with AWS. The Fargate engine provides a… Continue reading
The Mobile Apps and the Tester
The replatforming of our hybrid mobile app to separate iOS and Android native apps was already well under way when I arrived at FreeAgent as a test engineer for the mobile team. Since then we have carved out processes that the whole team can contribute to, giving us confidence that for each release our apps are in good shape. Here are a few things we are doing to ensure this.… 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
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
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
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
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
Replatforming the iOS mobile app
It has been just over a year since we shipped our replatformed iOS app to great reviews and many happy customers. In this post I would like to take a look back at where we came from and how the FreeAgent mobile app is shaping up for the future. We started developing the mobile app way back in 2014. At the time the entire engineering team was ~20 people and… Continue reading