From company hackathons and product releases to inspiring event speeches, it was a busy year for our growing engineering team last year! With lots of highlights to share, we wanted to shout about a few of the ones we’ve enjoyed the most. So here are our top engineering highlights of 2022!
A year in engineering: 10 highlights from 2022
1. Our team found a new office to call home! 🏢
In early 2022, our team we moved into our fantastic new office near Liverpool Street and Shoreditch. Since then, the space has given a lovely new base to everyone from engineers and Product Managers to Accufolk in non-technical roles. As you can imagine, we just couldn’t wait to kick start our own internal events…
2. We hosted the Deen Developers Food Poverty Hackathon🎉
We made use of our lovely new office space to welcome Deen Developers who ran a brilliant Food Poverty hackathon.
The hackathon kickoff and demos took place over a weekend, meaning teams could makewere in our main ground floor events space. During the weekend, the hackathon teams made full use of our multiple meeting rooms, with whiteboards, TV screens to collaborate effectively and integrations to work in a hybrid way with remote team members. There was plspace for participants to relax, socialise and network in the kitchen.
“We first heard about the event as some of our engineers belong to the Deen Developers community, and immediately thought the Deen Developers Food Poverty Hackathon this would be a great opportunity to support an event with a fantastic mission that aligns with our values as a company - and it was, with providing our office space and hosting. Hosting this event was a striking reminder of how many people are so passionate and driven about using technology for good.” — Emma Walker (Engineering Manager)
3. We ran 💥DevOps Exchange 💥
We hosted DevOps Exchange for the first time! Accurx’s very own Bharat Reddy, Senior DevOps Engineer, gave a thought-provoking talk outlining how how DevOps supports teams at Accurx “Devopsing it: DevOps practices that helped us* make keep patients healthy and healthcare staff happy.”
Bharat’s backend team mates, Jonny (Senior Devops Engineer) and Simona (Devops Engineer), also paired up a different DevOps events last year. As for the reasons why, Simona shared with us:
“Because Jonny suggested repeatedly that I should do it 😂. On a more serious note, I want to improve my communication skills and since I didn’t have the experience of public speaking, I thought that a more informal meetup is a great place to start.”
4. 👩💻 We hosted codebar too! 👩💻
In May, we hosted codebar, an organisation that aims to create a safe space and make learning to code more inclusive. Ayrton (Senior User Support Specialist & Diversity Equity Inclusion Belonging Lead organised for the group to use our office space and drum up support for coaches.
5. Sareh held the floor at ffconf🎤 Where we represented externally
“I was invited to speak at ffconf 2022 by Remy, one of the organisers. I’d previously attended in 2017 with a scholarship ticket and really enjoyed the single-track, community-focused event and knew I wanted to attend again. It was an honour to be asked to speak amongst seven other fantastic speakers.
I spoke on the topic of digital exclusion in healthcare, since it’s a topic I care about a lot and I wanted to share what all of us in tech can do to address digital exclusion. ffconf is one of my stand-out favourite tech events. Can’t wait to attend next year.” — Sareh Heidari — Senior Product Engineer GP Messaging
6. Jenny and Humayra gave great speeches at Lead Dev!
Working with LeadDev was a no-brainer! We had 2 incredible speakers Jenny and Humayra representing us!
Not only that, the conference is specifically aimed at senior and staff engineers and engineering managers, which is exactly what we were hiring for! It gave us another great opportunity to speak with potential candidates who had never heard of us before. That, coupled with two super engaging talks, meant we had great success there meeting lots of new faces and inviting people into our interview process.
“I spoke at Lead Dev London 2022 on how we scaled our engineering team. I felt I learnt a lot in the space of 2021 on hiring when our team was small. I wrote about what we learnt in a previous blog post and thought it might make for a good talk — especially for people in a similar position.
With the help of my colleague Sally Goble, I sent in a proposal that was accepted! Cue the fear! It was daunting going through the process but the talk landed well and I felt proud to represent Accurx.” — Jenny Sivapalan — Senior Engineering Manager
“I wanted to share my experiences with others. I was initially nervous but the group is very welcoming. You’re the expert on your experiences, and others are very much there to learn from you.” — Humayra, who also spoke at LeadDev in 2022
7. From Cornwall to Edinburgh, Sally’s been inspiring the tech community.
Last summer, Sally (Senior Engineering Manager) went to both ends of the UK to give talks in the Tech Community. She visited Cornwall to talk at Agile on the Beach:“I’ve spoken at Agile on the Beach before and have been on their programme review board for a number of years but this year they invited me to give a keynote, which was exciting, flattering and terrifying in equal measures. They ask you to propose a subject, and I proposed a couple of different options and in the end they were most interested in a talk on how you deal with tech debt when you are working at pace.”
A few weeks after, Sally took a trip to Scotland to give a similar talk at Turing Fest
“Turing Fest is a multidisciplinary conference but for start ups specifically and is in Scotland — so was super excited to present a slightly different version of the same talk on ‘Why you should care about tech debt’ to a new audience. Doing a talk more than once is always a great opportunity to iterate on the first time you did it and improve it!”
8. Emma shared her expertise about inclusion with Cord
We didn’t just speak at events, we also featured on some podcasts. Emma (Engineering Manager) spoke with Cord (a platform we have used to help us find Engineers) to chat all things tech and inclusion, Emma felt it gave a good opportunity to put public speaking into practice. Sally also featured on a podcast talking about tech career progression.
9. We met loads of great people at Turing Fest!
Turing Fest was such a thrill! Amongst train strikes and team birthdays we made it to Edinburgh!
We got to share our brand with a new market and gather insight from other health tech start-ups on their pain points and how they’re providing solutions to health care teams in Scotland.
We got to meet a whole cohort of new folk that were interested to hear about our journey and more importantly find out how they could get involved!
10. We sponsored Silicon Milkroundabout 🖖
We sponsored Silicon Milkroundabout in May and November of 2022. The aim was to share our name with the market amongst other start-ups as well established companies. We knew that Silicon Milkroundbaout would allow us the opportunity to speak with prospective candidates about who we are, what we do and more importantly why we do it!
Our Head of Data, Francesca also spoke on the panel on the future of technology 🚀
Where you find us in 2023?
We are attending NDC, this week in London. We have a team of Engineers going for the conference to learn new skills, hear different ideas and network! The stand will be taken care of by some of the Engineering Management team, along with Talent. We’re excited and hoping to meet lots of C# .NET engineers 💙Come say hi 👋
We’re also attending QCon in London. Much like LeadDev and NDC, we’ll have a group of Accurx engineers attending for learning and development purposes. We have also got our fingers crossed for Engineers who have submitted proposals to talk at the conference. We will be hosting a stand and partnering with Engineering Managers to discuss all of our roles, how you can apply and if it’s not the right time for you, how we can best keep in touch.
We’ve got some engineers applying to talks across a few conferences so hopefully we’ll see you there (we’ll mention this across our social media platforms when they happen!) and we are open to tech communities getting in touch to see if we can host an event in our office.
Please do get in touch if you’re interested, or head to our careers page for the latest job roles with us!
