Hosting an Engineering Away Day
“We’ve grown a lot during covid, and it’s been ages since we had the engineering community all together — it felt really special to see everyone in a room for the first time and see so much knowledge sharing and excitement over what we’re building.” Laurence Bargery CTO
In September, we held our first in-person Engineering team day. We’re excited that we’ve grown quickly and have a lot of new faces in the team. Since March last year, 28 people have joined the engineering team and most of them started remotely because of the pandemic — so we wanted to get everyone together for the first time.
The day was filled with different sessions all centred around software engineering topics, either related to the products we’ve built at accuRx or of general interest (like testing with Cypress and the inner details of 5G).
If you’re considering hosting a similar day, here’s what we learnt…
It’s really exciting to get everyone together in person again!
“It was wonderful to get everyone together after over a year of mostly being remote. Seeing a team in 1 place, together, when we’ve spent so much time on video calls was really joyful.” Ben, VP Engineering
We run lots of company activities to give everyone the chance to meet each other, lots of which have happened virtually throughout the pandemic, but until our Engineering Offsite, we hadn’t had a chance to bring all of our engineers together.
We’ve grown lots and there’s now 37 of us in the team. Our team structure has evolved with most of our engineers sitting within specific product teams and we’ve also introduced two new engineering-specific teams to support our vision and build our products at scale: The DevOps team and The Platform team.
We place a lot of importance on a sense of community at accuRx and wanted to host a day where engineers could get to know other members of the engineering team and share knowledge. We hope regular away days will encourage people to share best practice across the team, which will ultimately help us to build quality products at accuRx.
“It was a great opportunity to catch up with other engineers, meet new joiners and hear about what others are working on. It was really good to reflect on how we’re going to scale the engineering community and the impact that will have on teams and engineers.” Emma Chambers, Product Engineer.
Encouraging a wide range of speakers means lots of varied and engaging sessions
We encouraged the team to sign up to give presentations, workshops and discussion topics. As this was our first time running this event, we kept the topics broad across the engineering function. We used our engineering team slack channel to regularly raise that the day was coming and encourage people to get ready for it and ask questions. We had a good sign up rate and provided time for speakers to practice in advance if they wanted it.
The morning was centred around how far we’ve come as an Engineering team and areas we need to be thinking about in the future. This included topics around building world class products that are accessible for all our users, that our services strive towards four nines reliability and continuing to invest and grow our engineering team.
Our VP Engineering, Ben Osborne, ran a session about our engineering organisation:
“As we grow as an Engineering team, a part of scaling well is putting in the support structures for knowledge sharing, team coordination, strategic technology choices, career development, scaling and onboarding. Hopefully this session helped the team to understand why we have the structures, and get the support they need to thrive and deliver great work in a growing complex ecosystem.”
We finished the morning with Calum Eadie (Engineering Manager) leading on how we can get ready for more rapid scaling next year and what the impact of it could mean for each of us and our teams. Calum found the session useful to anticipate opportunities and threats that scaling creates to set us up for success.
After catching up over lunch, we moved onto an afternoon of presentations and workshops from git rebase tips, the truth about 5G and Cypress testing, to tech leadership and the Devops and Platform successes to date and plans ahead.
We had some great feedback on the sessions!
“Really enjoyed the day! Thought all the sessions were very informative, one that I particularly enjoyed was the git rebase workshop, I’m already putting what I learnt into practice. 🙌🏽 ” Baz, Senior Product Engineer
It’s exciting to celebrate our wins together as one big team
We really enjoyed sharing some of the team’s brilliant work and progress so far, particularly in the platform engineering team.
“The platform engineering update brought to light some of the great work that has gone on behind the scenes to provide scale to our product teams to help them move faster without compromising on reliability and security. It also highlighted some of the challenges we face in doing this, and has opened up a channel for our engineers to contribute to our direction and improve our chances of success.” Bharat Reddy, Senior DevOps Engineer
Going off site provided was a great opportunity to discuss tech leadership
Our Technical Director, Mike Pryor talked through his experience of tech leadership and ran an open discussion with other tech leads and people interested in the role in the future.
“As the wider engineering team grows and evolves it’s important to both establish what the current expectations of the role are and also hear from current TLs to understand how to best support them and improve the definition of TL going forward.”
So what’s next for our engineering team?
As a team, we felt the deep dives and knowledge sharing were invaluable and we got a lot from interacting with each other, particularly those that we don’t work with in our day-to-day. The day gave us an opportunity to reflect and think about how we’ll scale the engineering community and the impact that will have.
We’ve decided to get together every 6 months to run a similar day. In 6 months time, we’ll be a bigger engineering team (~60 people) with lots of new experiences to share with each other. Sharing what we’ve learnt in projects or a technical deep dive of an area will help us when approaching new challenges. It’s a great opportunity for people to chat with people outside of their immediate team and build relationships.
If working in an environment which values sharing knowledge and growing together is up your street, check out the openings we have: https://www.accurx.com/careers
