All posts tagged with 'internship'

Thinking on paper the software engineering way
Starting your first engineering job feels like a race against time. Handle coding, survive testing, run through a slew of inductions and find time somewhere in there to meet your teammates. Organisation tools are everywhere. But with a schedule spread across Google Calendar, Notion, and the odd Slack notification, nailing the daily admin can become a chore in its own right. The purpose of a planner is to break down… Continue reading

Ease into Ruby with a Python background
Starting your first role as a software engineer and having no knowledge of the programming language used in your organisation sounds like a nightmare at first, as thoughts of the imposter syndrome that many of us seem to suffer from these days start to take over. But worry not. At FreeAgent the environment is very friendly and relaxed, allowing you as a new joiner to focus on learning and integrating… Continue reading

Factories: don’t stop production!
Why this post? Have you ever come across a situation where you need to write a test that uses some model objects, but found that those have endless dependencies on the existence of other objects, from the same model or otherwise? Have you ever come across a test where you only care about a specific attribute of a model object, but you find yourself having to populate every single one… Continue reading

How to survive imposter syndrome in your software engineering internship
Hi there! My name is Fiona, and I am an intern at FreeAgent. I got my offer and dodged returning to the monotony of bar work that I endured last summer. However, I was only in my second year of studying Computer Science. How was I chosen from what must have been a sea of applicants? They must have overlooked someone! Had I lucked out? In hindsight, this was a… Continue reading

My internship project: from ideation to implementation
When I started my internship at FreeAgent, I had no idea what to expect. I read previous blog posts and saw that interns get up to a wide range of things! I spent my first weeks here doing onboarding tasks and fixing small bugs. Once I’d started to get familiar with the codebase and the way FreeAgent works, it was time to start my project. 😮 My team manages Sudo,… Continue reading

The Data Science Internship Chronicles: A Starfleet-worthy Tale of Numeric Exploration
In the vast expanse of the universe, I, a humble data science intern, set out on a mission to improve a classification model. As I delved deeper into the data, I encountered anomalies and outliers that threatened to disrupt my analysis. But with the guidance of my mentors and the help of advanced data tools, I navigated through the stars and uncovered the hidden patterns that led to breakthrough insights.… Continue reading

My experience as an Analytics Intern
I was really excited to begin interning at FreeAgent and after 9 weeks in the Data Analytics team I feel I’ve learnt a lot about working in a team inside a company, and about the culture here. I thought I would write a bit about how it was getting set up, working on my project and communicating my findings to the rest of the company. Onboarding/set-up There were a lot… Continue reading

Fixing my first bug – the experience
As a computer science student, I obviously fixed bugs in code before. However, the first one I had to fix at FreeAgent felt significantly different from the corrections I had to make in my university assignments and other small projects. I think that was because whenever I worked on a project, I either wrote the whole code or the project contained just a few files. That meant I could skim… Continue reading

A brief introduction to ‘the cloud’ and managing infrastructure with code
Over the last decade the ‘cloud’ has become increasingly prevalent . A cloud based system allows a company to flexibly buy servers, storage, networking and various other services that are hosted externally rather than on-site, typically with a programmatic interface to allow large-scale use. According to a 2019 report, 94% of companies were utilising the cloud in one way or another. The market for cloud providers was valued at $200… Continue reading

What is a tech spec and why do I need one?
For the past three months, I’ve been a Software Engineering Intern in the Connections & Add-ons team here at FreeAgent. We look after a number of features that allow FreeAgent to work with third-party services: if a business owner wants to get paid faster, they can add a PayPal, Stripe, GoCardless or Tyl payment link to their invoices; if they need to get their business insured, they can sign up… Continue reading