This document will guide you through the process of giving a warm welcome to new members, or at least give you a nice starting point:
The onboarding process takes up to 1 week, here is how the week would look like:
This day is all about culture, the new members will spend the whole day with the cultural team. The purpose of this day is to explain some of our rituals, work dynamic and get to know other members.
Some tasks to complete must be done by the end of the day:
- Setup for Icalia General tools: Email & Slack
- Setup for Icalia Dev tools (if applicable): Github, Codeship, Foresight
On this day the operations manager will step in and give an introduction on how Icalia works from a operations-like perspective, some topics to cover are:
- What is the process a client lives with Icalia Labs?
- Discovery Session
- Design Sprint
- Minimum Viable Product Development
- Release
- Times & Materials
- How the design & development team work together?
- What are the tools we use on a daily basis?
- Slack
- Github
- Pivotal Tracker
- Codeship
- Email & Calendar
- How to deal with a client?
- Schedule meetings
- Schedule demo days
- Schedule weekly standups
Once the presentation is over, new Icaliers should head to the guides repo and playbook, as they have a lot of information about best practices, being remote and some other useful stuff.
This day is more about technical stuff, the new comer will sit down with one of the engineers and will be guided through the development process:
- Git flow
- How to submit a pull request
- What to expect from code review?
- Running linters
- Green tests
- Rebasing with master
- Github 1-on-1
- Place comments
- Insert code samples
- Best code practices according to Icalia
- Testing and why do it
On this day we will keep working with technical stuff, it is Docker time. Every developer at Icalia develops using docker to help eliminate the gap between different environments or machines.
- What is Docker?
- Why we use it?
- Docker in the wild
- Whales and its background
- Foresight demo
On the last day of the onboarding it's more about sitting around with other team members, chat with them and get to know them. We care a lot for human relations and how the team members may work together, so it is nice if you know the developer next to you, not just because of its abilities.
Some rituals that work are:
- Refactor Friday and/or Tech talk
- Have a pair programming session with someone on the team
- Have a 1-on-1 hangout to talk about non work related stuff