All posts tagged with 'data'
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
Shopping for data: How thinking about supermarkets might help you to manage your Looker implementation
This blog makes a comparison between a well run supermarket and a well designed Looker implementation. 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
What is a Business Intelligence Analyst?
The term Business Intelligence Analyst (or BI Analyst for short) can be a confusing one. Broadly speaking, the role of a BI Analyst can overlap with lots of other job titles that you might see out in the wild, such as: Data AnalystData ScientistInsight AnalystProduct AnalystMarketing AnalystCommercial AnalystReporting AnalystMI AnalystWeb AnalystCRM/Customer Analyst In general - and especially in the data world - job titles can often be inconsistent and subjective.… Continue reading
How to Measure Pointless Things?
Here at FreeAgent we, like so many other workplaces around the world, have been adjusting to a fully remote setup over the past few weeks. Whilst a significant number of our company’s employees are permanently home-based, only one of our seven Analytics & Data Science team members is usually based away from our Edinburgh office. It has felt strange. We decided fairly quickly that we needed to create new opportunities… Continue reading
On the road to real-time reporting with incremental data transfer
Reporting Data at FreeAgent We keep track of a range of customer behaviours in the FreeAgent application as a means to understand engagement and to formulate and measure our OKRs. Examples of this include support requests raised through our ticketing system, Zendesk, the scores and comments provided by our users during NPS surveys and event data detailing specific actions taken within the application. As a concrete example of the latter,… Continue reading
Deriving and verifying the uncertainty on conversion rate predictions
For the past few weeks I’ve been working on building a machine learning model that can estimate the probability that a customer will convert from the free trial to a paid subscriber. In practice, I combine the predictions from this model for cohorts of companies, which are defined by their acquisition channel and acquisition month, and so a method is required for calculating the conversion rate uncertainties for each cohort.… Continue reading
Settling in for summer: my data science internship
The application process After having the fantastic and inevitable university-student-in-their-penultimate-year realisation that I’m almost one year away from graduation and do not feel adequately prepared, I decided that an internship could be a great way to up my experience and knowledge before my final year. Data science, specifically, is what I was looking for as I’m interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence, and I thought a data science internship… Continue reading
How to count what counts
At FreeAgent we’re building a new platform to allow our teams to explore their data and glean new insights from it. The platform is built using Looker on top of Amazon Redshift, and so far it’s been enthusiastically received by the teams that use it. However, the process of building up the platform and driving adoption hasn’t been entirely straightforward. There has been a recurring issue that we’ve have had… Continue reading
Querying the past
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