THE COMPANY INDEX TRACKED BLOG
Ideas, decisions, and lessons from the team.
engineering.freeagent.com (opens on the source site)LinkedIn XIt isn’t very hard to pitch tech conferences. Offering a getaway from the usual desk work, a chance to pick up on new wisdoms from like-minded and genuinely inspiring folk, and room in the itinerary for sightseeing and socialising in the hip host city in between times? It’s a no-brainer… well, for most. I had […]
Read at the sourceUsing RSpec's functionality expressively helps to draw focus to the right parts of a test, but it's not always easy to understand how best to use it.
Read at the sourceIn March I attended Web Day Out – a one-day event all about what you can do in web browsers today. It was hosted by Clearleft at the Brighton Dome Studio. It was a brilliant day featuring a diverse line-up, friendly hosting and opportunities to mingle with likeminded souls. At this time when software engineers […]
Read at the sourceText classification is often done through fine-tuning of a pretrained foundation model with domain-specific data. In FreeAgent we use transformer based models to automatically classify incoming bank transactions. Specifically we use a DistilBERT model that is fine-tuned on hundreds of millions of bank transactions with customer-labelled accounting categories. The model inputs are currently text-based, built from a combination of bank transaction descriptions and amounts. In this post we describe an approach to fine-tuning the DistilBERT model and training the classifier including the…
Read at the sourceOne of the challenges of working with LLMs is getting them to respond with a consistent format, such as a given JSON schema. Anyone who has tried to solve this issue with prompt engineering knows how frustrating it can be. You add a ‘MUST’ here and an ‘always return JSON’ there, but still the output […]
Read at the sourceChoosing good names for objects and methods in code is one of the toughest things to do as a software engineer. It comes with the great and invisible reward of simplicity – second only to having less code in the first place, having code that’s easy to reason with makes extending it and debugging it in […]
Read at the sourceWe are Carme and Mila, both software engineers at FreeAgent, where we collaborate as mentee and mentor. In this blog we interview each other about our mentoring relationship. We’re hoping that our experience is universal and sharing our insights will be useful to anyone who is interested in mentoring. If you like what you read, […]
Read at the sourceIntroduction We recently encountered an interesting problem when using Turbo Streams to update part of a complex nested form in FreeAgent’s main Ruby on Rails web application. For those unfamiliar, nested forms allow a user to enter data relating to both a main parent object and its associated objects. This could be, for example, a […]
Read at the sourceIntroduction The heart of a reliable data platform are robust and automated data pipelines. As our team migrates our data pipelines to Dagster, re-architecting our automation logic is a crucial task. Dagster offers condition-based approaches to creating or updating a data asset (table or file), moving us toward a modern, asset-centric view of data. This […]
Read at the sourceHotwire is central to how we drive the frontend at FreeAgent, and Action Cable allows us to send Turbo Streams as users browse the site, adding a layer of richness to the user experience.
Read at the source