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Our data science hiring process

Posted by Dave Evans on 28 January 2022

In this blog post, I’m going to describe our hiring process for data science roles, starting from an advertised role. Hopefully this post will be of some use if you’re thinking about hiring in data science! Continue reading

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Hidden

Hiding Elements on the Web

Posted by Laurence Hughes on 18 January 2022

For many of us the word hiding has visual connotations. But remember that the web is perceived both visually and non-visually.Ā In this talk, Laurence Hughes from our Design System team explains that hiding is a tricky front-end development technique, used for both user interface experiences and accessibility-related purposes. He also provides some tips on how we can avoid doing DIY hiding completely. https://youtu.be/AZ6uw4KCOQA Continue reading

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How I prepare for a tech job interview

Posted by Jack Gladas on 5 January 2022

You’ve updated your CV, applied for a job in tech and been offered an interview. Fantastic! But what next? Preparing for interviews is time consuming and can feel daunting, particularly in the earlier stages of your career. I’ve found that having a regimented process for this preparation can reduce stress and save valuable time. In this post I’m going to outline my own process and provide some examples of what… Continue reading

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Being an Introvert in a Meeting

Posted by Delphine Rabiller on 30 November 2021

A toolbox to get your voice heard Introvert: a typically reserved or quiet person who tends to be introspective and more comfortable with a small group of people. Context This November, Lea [1], Lana [2] and myself went to the Women of Silicon Roundabout conference. There were a few talks around developing your soft skills to be better in the world of tech. One talk that particularly interested me was… Continue reading

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Using data to understand the effects of a four day working week

Posted by Lana Turnbull on 27 October 2021

As you may have already heard, FreeAgent implemented a four-day week throughout the summer this year as a ā€˜thank you’ for the employees’ contributions during the pandemic and a year of working from home.Ā  Whilst Pat George’s blog post talks about measuring the success of the four-day week with ā€œjob satisfaction, business objectives and personal stress levelsā€, as an analyst, I wanted to see if I could find less anecdotal… Continue reading

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calendar

Here’s to Thriday

Posted by Pat George on 4 October 2021

The last eighteen months have been very hard.  You know that, you’ve lived it.  We’ve all done what we can in order to get by.  A couple months ago FreeAgent decided to help us do that by giving us Fridays off for the months of July and August.  I admit when it was first announced in our weekly Town Hall I didn’t listen to the rest of the meeting; I… Continue reading

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tuning mechanism for a guitar

Fine-Tuning BERT for multiclass categorisation with Amazon SageMaker

Posted by Owen Turner on 15 September 2021

This post describes our approach to fine-tuning a BERT model for multiclass categorisation with Hugging Face and Amazon SageMaker. Continue reading

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Software engineering: 5 things they don’t teach you at university

Posted by georgebaker on 10 September 2021

Introduction Over the past couple of months, I’ve been working as an intern software engineer in the Banking Integrations team here at FreeAgent. Before I started, I had just finished the second year of my Computer Science degree at the University of Birmingham.  Whilst university taught me a multitude of skills, there are many that can only be truly gained from working in a company. I’d like to share some… Continue reading

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The Value of an Internship at FreeAgent

Posted by Anna Parry on 9 September 2021

Coming from a chemistry background, I’d never have thought that the skills I was learning at university could be transferred to working as an analytics intern at FreeAgent, but this summer I proved myself wrong. After spending a lot of time taking courses in Python and SQL with the Code First: Girls charity through a year of lockdown, this internship was the perfect opportunity for me to develop everything I… Continue reading

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New wine, old skins – how FreeAgent blends existing tools and fresh approaches

Posted by Joe Carstairs on 8 September 2021

According to the parable in Matthew’s gospel, ā€œno-one pours new wine into old wineskins – otherwise, the wine would burst the wine-skins, and both would be ruined.ā€ So, coming into FreeAgent as an intern, I wondered – would FreeAgent prefer the new wine in the new skins or the old wine in the old skins? Would they satisfy the stereotype of the tech start-up, move fast and break things, trip… Continue reading

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