What is a good onboarding process for a new employee at a startup?
13th August 2013
My answer to What is a good onboarding process for a new employee at a startup? on Quora
Have them deploy the site on their first day. This ensures they know how to...
- Set up a working development environment
- Check code out of your repository
- Navigate the code base
- Make code changes
- Run tests
- Pass a code review (or at least get some peer review)
- QA their change beyond just the automated tests
- Deploy their change to production
If they do all of this on day one, they’ll come in on day two ready to start building and shipping production code.
This also means your team need to have a development/deployment environment that can be set up in less than a day, albeit with a little guidance. This is a very good thing.
If your infrastructure is good enough you can even do this with non-technical employees as well—let them edit the “about” page on your site to add themselves through the GitHub web editor and hit a “deploy” button in Jenkins or similar to deploy the site!
More recent articles
- Datasette Enrichments: a new plugin framework for augmenting your data - 1st December 2023
- llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer - 29th November 2023
- Prompt injection explained, November 2023 edition - 27th November 2023
- I'm on the Newsroom Robots podcast, with thoughts on the OpenAI board - 25th November 2023
- Weeknotes: DevDay, GitHub Universe, OpenAI chaos - 22nd November 2023
- Deciphering clues in a news article to understand how it was reported - 22nd November 2023
- Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat? - 15th November 2023
- Financial sustainability for open source projects at GitHub Universe - 10th November 2023
- ospeak: a CLI tool for speaking text in the terminal via OpenAI - 7th November 2023
- DALL-E 3, GPT4All, PMTiles, sqlite-migrate, datasette-edit-schema - 30th October 2023