Hi all, This is Ning Li from Colorkrew. I am a lead engineer who oversees several in-house service developments in Colorkrew. In this blog, please let me introduce the technical onboarding in Colorkrew.

We have been working hard to improve this progress in recent years, so that our new members can join the team smoothly and get excellent work experience. We are considering 3 points.

• Technical stack onboarding
• Project onboarding
• Team onboarding

These points are treated specifically but are connected. Our goal is preparing a process that the new members can go through until they eventually feel comfortable in daily work.

1. Technical stack onboarding

This one is straightforward. For new members, there might be some knowledge they need to handle before they can develop freely in Colorkrew. It happens in every position in every company. For new members, we arrange team members to give presentations regarding every part of our system to them. It covers a big picture of the whole system and necessary points during the development. They don’t need to understand every point deeply at this timing but could get a rough image regarding our service and technical stack. It’s a good opportunity to review our current system design with new members’ feedback, and a good chance for them to know other members in the team.

2. Project onboarding

For specific projects, we have different development processes. For example, in Goalous project, we have a development process including local development, PR and review, test in dev/stg env, deployment to customer Env. It contains a lot of details, such as coding standards, review policy, test flow and rollback policy. When new members come, they should understand the rules we are following and reasons behind. We arrange paring programming sessions with them for every development phase. They will go through all the process together with experienced members, so that they can handle it eventually under the review of team.

3. Team onboarding

During the onboarding process of technical stack and project, we treat communication as a quite important factor. In every presentation and paring programming session, we are not just talking about knowledge and experience, but also covering necessary casual talk to have more understanding with each other. The new members will get to know everyone in the team without reaching out a lot.

We are also planning some office events to gather project members together once per week or 2 weeks. People can have more casual talk in this environment and build good relationship with each other. Of course, we keep everyone’s health in mind under this Covid-19 situation.

Furthermore, we encourage our new members to communicate actively after they join the company. We have already prepared a lot for you. If you can seize this opportunity during the onboarding, you will have an amazing starting point in the company.

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