Welcome! We're happy to have you as part of our team. :)
Don't worry about "hitting the ground running." Slow and steady wins the race.
These docs are meant to be read sequentially by someone new to the team. They are developer-oriented. We also have a more general onboarding guide here.
Assuming you've already got your Stanford laptop, one of the devs will schedule a casual one-on-one meeting with you to discuss getting started. (If you don't have your laptop yet, no worries.) Some goals you could set for yourself during your first few days are:
- get your laptop,
- make sure you have access to your Stanford email,
- make sure you have access to the Gecko Group Slack,
- say hello to everybody in the
#generalchannel on the Gecko Group Slack, - read through these docs,
- get started on required training for Stanford, and
- review the onboarding checklist GitHub issue to see what else needs to be done.
Be sure to follow up on anything that needs doing, and don't be afraid to ask questions either on Zoom or on Slack.
A few goals you could set for yourself during your first few weeks of development are:
- do any required training for Stanford (there will be a lot),
- get your laptop set up for development,
- maybe work on some small tickets,
One thing you could do (although you're not expected to do this) is schedule some one-on-one time with each of the devs and the non-devs to get to know them and ask some questions about what they work on. Feel free to ask plenty of questions! There are no "bad" or "dumb" questions.
In the past we've had an informal onboarding process where we would coordinate via Slack and get everything set up. As of May 2024, we're trying a new process where we have a GitHub issue containing a checklist for onboarding new developers. The checklist issue should be in the gecko-admin repository.