Grinding Gears

In this blog post, I’ll explain how to use some simple R-based data cleaning solutions (mostly in the ‘tidyverse’ package1) to address the most common dataset errors with the help of my favourite analogy: the untidy kitchen! NB: There are a plethora of valuable data cleaning tools in other software and even within R there are many different tools available. While the approach that I describe here is not necessarily… Continue reading

Soon after settling in at FreeAgent and getting to grips with my role as a data science intern, I got the opportunity to present some of the data that I had been working on at a ‘town hall’, a company-wide weekly meeting where everyone gets together to present their work, share news and pitch ideas. The data I presented was attitudinal survey data from accountancy practices that had contracts with… Continue reading

My regular job is as a PhD student specialising in veterinary biology but this summer I have an amazing opportunity to be a data science intern at FreeAgent. If you are wondering why a biologist came to work at an accountancy software company, this is because of the particular branch of biology that I study: ‘epidemiology’. An epidemiologist typically uses data to understand ‘the distribution and determinants of health-related states… Continue reading

This summer it has been my pleasure to join FreeAgent as a Data Engineering intern. Alongside the analytics and architecture teams, I have been working on a new exciting feature to complement the FreeAgent application. Programming mostly with Python, I have learned a great deal from my colleagues, and I wish to share the experience with you all here on the engineering blog. Since joining in early June, the intern… Continue reading

I’ve been learning to love the ActiveRecord query interface over the past few months. Whilst I find it infuriating when I’m battling it to do what I actually want, I also relish the power and convenience it gives me for many simple queries. So, when it came to designing a query language for historical data in our systems, ActiveRecord was a natural choice. We can now do queries like: FA::Subscriptions.… Continue reading

Fiona Christie joined us here at FreeAgent on a 3-month internship with our Data Science team this summer after completing an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Glasgow. She impressed us so much that we offered her a full-time role and we even managed to persuade her to write this post about her experience as an intern. Condensing my time at FreeAgent into one post hasn’t… Continue reading