All posts tagged with 'internship'
Engineering lessons from my SaaS startup
I’m now almost two months into my software engineering summer internship at FreeAgent. When I was 18, I chose to delay the start of my university course for 18 months to have a go at building a ‘Software as a Service’ (or ‘SaaS’) startup with two others. Our software, ‘trackio’, was a bring-your-own data platform that allowed sales teams to collect, connect and reconcile their disjointed data sources. It was… Continue reading
How to boost your confidence as a beginner software engineer
Every engineer has questioned at least once in their life whether they are skilled enough for their chosen field. I experienced these doubts when I started my computer science degree at university, and despite the fact that I got through the first three years successfully, I still wasn’t fully confident in my abilities when I started my internship at FreeAgent. However, this is entirely normal. Every engineer faces challenges on… Continue reading
An introduction to object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming, or OOP, is a programming paradigm centred around the concept of objects. This article will aim to provide a basic understanding of objects, classes, OOP principles and various other concepts within the paradigm. Code examples will be mediated in the Ruby programming language, which is an example of an object-oriented language. In Ruby, any value is an object, even data types like String and Integer, which are often… Continue reading
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
10 tips and tricks for a good intern job application
We’ve recently completed the hiring for this year's cohort of summer interns and as a result we’ve processed hundreds of applications; just across our data teams we had over 600 this year! For many of these applicants, who tend to still be at university or have recently graduated, this is likely to be one of the first ‘professional’ roles that they are applying for. As such they might not be… Continue reading
Software engineering: 5 things they don’t teach you at university
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
The Value of an Internship at FreeAgent
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
New wine, old skins – how FreeAgent blends existing tools and fresh approaches
According to the parable in Matthew’s gospel, “no-one pours new wine into old wineskins – otherwise, the wine would burst the wine-skins, and both would be ruined.” 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
I Came, I Saw, I Categorised
It’s been a wild time this summer at FreeAgent: four-day weeks, Edinburgh flooding, people gearing up to return to the office, and in the meantime you have me, the remote software engineering intern, working away in his little corner of the FreeAgent world. But before all that, who is this wee guy? Well, I’m Fraser Dempster and I spent 12 weeks of my summer at FreeAgent. Excuse me, I'm lost… Continue reading