All posts tagged with 'data science'
What a data science degree doesn’t teach you
When I enrolled on my data science master’s degree I had limited statistical and coding knowledge. This course was designed to teach these skills from the bottom up. Having now worked as a software engineering intern, I have come to realise a lot of things were missed. Moving beyond ‘if it works… it works!’ Learning to code can seem very daunting. There are so many resources and even languages. Where… Continue reading
Getting started with Jupyter Notebook
Jupyter Notebook is a development environment that runs in your web browser and can be used with several languages, including R and Python. In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the benefits of using Jupyter Notebook and how to start using it with Python. Benefits of Jupyter Notebook Chunking code into cells Instead of having to write code in large flat files, developers can use Jupyter Notebook to… Continue reading
How we structure our data teams at FreeAgent
Since joining FreeAgent back in April I’ve been both impressed and interested with how the Data organisation is structured. I’ve come from an enterprise world where you have lots of Data Engineers, a team of dedicated Data Architects and a separate Business Intelligence org. A few things that immediately struck me at FreeAgent were: No one has the title ‘Data Engineer’Data Analytics are part of the Engineering orgNo one has… Continue reading
Trading the lab coat for the computer – my journey to data science
I became a data scientist just over two years ago. It’s not that long since I traded my lab coat for a computer job, and a few people have asked me how I made the transition, if I could help someone get into data or if I could just answer some questions about what it’s like to work in data. So I figured I would put it all together in… Continue reading
Training Hugging Face models in parallel with SageMaker
In this post I'll describe how we train our Hugging Face models in a fraction of the time with a data parallel approach. Continue reading
Our data science hiring process
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
Managing Python dependencies across multiple Data Science projects with Poetry
Python is the programming language of choice for running analysis, building models and running machine learning services in production for the Data Science team at FreeAgent. A key reason we chose Python is the great ecosystem of packages available: NumPy, pandas, SciPy and scikit-learn, deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow and more bespoke options for specific tasks like Click for developing CLIs. This wealth of options is a great strength of… Continue reading
Six years of data science and analytics interns at FreeAgent
It’s hard to believe we’ve been running internships in our data teams for six years now, and we’re about to start recruitment for the seventh time. Things have changed a little since our first intern started, as last year saw more than four times as many staff in the wider team and our first remote internship during the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve always tended to think of our internships as a… 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
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