Joining Accurx as a frontend engineer: my story
Hello, my name’s Etin Obaseki and I joined Accurx two months ago as a Product Engineer with a frontend focus. Before Accurx, I lived in Benin City, Nigeria. As you can imagine, it was a bit of a jump into the unknown moving overseas. I had wanted to move abroad for a while and, after choosing the UK as my country of choice, I came across a job on Accurx’s career page.
The role stood out to me because of the amount of thought that had gone into not just the job ad but into publicly available resources like the company’s progression frameworks. The more I looked into it, the more I felt that it was just the kind of challenge I fancied.
Before Accurx, I worked at a few different startups. These were mostly in digital media and e-commerce. On top of this, my last three jobs have all involved healthcare-focused start ups, so I’d like to think I’m becoming something of a specialist there. :)
Having now been at Accurx for two months, this feels like a great time to share my thoughts and experiences for anyone else thinking of joining the company — particularly any engineers out there.
What was it like joining Accurx?
Exciting! My first impression was one of welcoming and of a warm, friendly work culture. Having just moved to London, getting the support from my colleagues has been invaluable. I’ve been given a lot of support with the visa process and gotten great recommendations on where to find accommodation, how to navigate the city, recipes, shopping tips and even help with making a list of tourist-y things to do.
Onboarding has also been a great experience. I’ve felt supported to learn all I can about the healthcare system in the UK. Very quickly, I realised that Accurx is a genuinely mission-focused company and that better healthcare communication sits at the forefront of everyone’s day-to-day work. Accurx has a simple but powerful mission that really resonates with me — to make patients healthier and healthcare staff happier. I think that simplicity helps us to all pull in the same direction — even if some of the work getting there can be complex and challenging.
Life as a frontend engineer
Accurx has a really pleasant engineering culture. There is plenty of autonomy for both individuals and for the cross-functional teams that make up the engineering community. Together, we work in two month cycles committing to an ambitious, new set of goals every eight weeks. I’ve read a lot of opinions on this style contrasted against the more traditional two week sprints cadence and I personally enjoy this more. The cycle cadence feels long enough to make a big bet but also short enough to not be complacent about deadlines.
I work as part of the Flow team. Our team owns a number of key products including Patient Triage and the Desktop inbox. Like most other teams at Accurx, we’re a cross-functional team made up of Product Engineers, a User Researcher, an Operations Manager, a Clinical lead and a Product Manager.
We work closely with other teams, often collaborating on shared features that we each own a part of. It’s a great environment to share work as everyone is open to both feedback and different perspectives while aiming for the highest quality work possible. I’ve found that this push for excellence is well balanced against a healthy respect for each other’s expertise.
What I’ve been working on
One of my earliest projects has been to improve the accessibility of Accurx’s Patient Triage software. If you don’t know, Patient Triage is a web-based online consultation tool that allows patients to submit a short medical or admin query directly to their clinician. Given Patient Triage can transform how practices interact with their patients, it’s vital that it offers a smooth experience for patients.
For anyone unfamiliar with web accessibility, it’s all about removing barriers to accessing and interacting with content on the web. At Accurx, the products we build are used across the NHS and across the patient population. This means our software needs to be able to serve people with a variety of accessibility needs.
The great thing is that, when you put in the effort to make software more accessible, every user benefits from the extra attention and detail that has gone into shaping it.
How my team worked
Following an audit, my team came away with a list of improvements to make Patient Triage more accessible both in the short and longer term. We’re aiming to fix all of the issues found in the audit to make Patient Triage usable for as many people as possible. I picked up this task after some fantastic work by my colleagues. From then onwards, I received plenty of support and enthusiasm from my team and the wider engineering community about getting the rest of the changes over the line.
One of the more interesting changes I’ve made as part of this was updating our custom Select component to be more accessible. We built a custom implementation of the select element so that it would better fit with our design system and to have the ability to extend it to have features like typing ahead and selecting multiple items. However, this comes at the cost of the accessibility that the default element provides.
There were a number of items we had to address to make sure our select component was accessible including: making sure that the different parts of the select — such as the trigger button or the list of items — were identifiable to screen readers. This ensured that the different states such as opened and closed were identifiable to screen readers, managing the focus state so that users could more easily navigate to and select an option, and styling this to ensure that the new component fit in with our existing design system.
It’s always so interesting to see how much thinking and effort needs to go into something that’s so simple on the surface.
But it hasn’t all been work…
Since joining, I’ve enjoyed lots of new experiences from riding the London Underground to soaking up the city life. I’ve learned to play pool — and although I’ve lost three quarters of the 40-odd games I’ve played, I’m sure I’ll get good enough to be crowned office champion soon 🤞🏿. I’ve also been on some team socials (I’ve even helped plan one!) and gotten to meet and make friends with a lot of the wonderful people I work with.
In the short time I have been here it has been a fantastic experience, with great colleagues and challenging work. I am looking forward to being even more involved and working on all the exciting things planned for the near future. I haven’t been here for very long but I’ve already seen how much impact the work that we do has on healthcare. I am more convinced than ever that software can have a very real and very positive impact on the world.
I am really excited to see what happens next and grateful for the opportunity to do such rewarding work that impacts so many people across the UK and, hopefully soon, elsewhere in the world!
Interested in joining our team like Etin? Check out our careers page for the latest job opportunities!
