Month 1

Week 1

Week 1 will get you setup to deliver awesome things in the future. You will also gain your first exposure to the architecture of Sourcegraph.

• Complete starter tasks: There are a variety of onboarding tasks that are applicable to all engineers at Sourcegraph. Completing these is a prerequisite to further work, so please prioritize them!
• Attend team meetings: The Repo Management team has a regular meeting schedule to coordinate work and keep in touch with each other across timezones and continents. Join these meetings, ask lots of questions and start to get a feel for the team and its activities. What do we build, and why? Who uses it and how does it help them?
• Attend an architecture presentation: Sourcegraph has many moving pieces, and many of those moving pieces interact with repo management services. Your onboarding buddy will present a high-level overview of the system and its components, which will give you a foundation for taking deeper code dives in week 2.
• Pair with your buddy on their work: We do not require engineers to pair program as part of their daily activities, but it can be an effective strategy for sharing knowledge quickly. Set up an hour with your onboarding buddy to either contribute to their current work, or do a code review of previous work that they’d like to share.

Week 2

You completed your first week—great job! The first week is always a whirlwind of documents and tasks, so this week we will calm things down a bit. The focus is on working as a team and being open and transparent.

Here’s where you’ll spend your time in week 2:

• Pair with your buddy on your work: Your onboarding buddy will pair with you on one or more tasks from our Kanban board. These will be tasks that we’ve previously evaluated as being good for new hires to tackle (and ship to production!)
• Pair with a different team member on their work: Now let’s switch things up!. Set up time with a different repo management team member and help them with something they’re currently working on. Ask plenty of questions to understand how things fit together (and why).
• Take a service tour: We’ve created service tours for important services that we interact with regularly. Choose one of them, use the links in the supporting documentation to explore the code, and then discuss what you learned with your onboarding buddy.

Week 3

You’re halfway done with your first month at Sourcegraph! Time flies, doesn’t it? This week is about helping you deliver with high agency and high quality.

Here’s where you’ll spend your time in week 3:

• Participate in planning: Now that you have some hands-on experience with the Sourcegraph project, help us plan and estimate the upcoming iteration. Don’t worry about pinpoint accuracy—we want to hear your voice and your contributions, and we’ll help guide you.
• Tackle larger work: We will have some larger issues that you can take to build off what you have learned so far. Don’t worry: we are here to help and make sure you’re successful.
• Take further service tours: Last week, you took one of our service tours and discussed what you learned with your onboarding buddy. Select a different one and do the same thing this week. Additionally, relate this service tour to the previous one—how / why do these services connect, what data is being operated upon, etc.

Week 4

Congratulations on wrapping up your first month! This week is about continuously growing and continuing to make Sourcegraph welcoming and inclusive.

Here’s where you’ll spend your time in week 4:

• Give an architecture presentation: Now it’s your turn to teach us! Using the Sourcegraph architecture diagram, present a lunch-and-learn to the team about how Sourcegraph works. We’ll help fill in any gaps, and probably learn a few things ourselves!
• Improve one or more service tours: Based on your experiences so far, improve one or more of our service tours. It doesn’t matter how large or small the change, just find something you think is worth sharing and make it available to others.
• Help us improve onboarding: Onboarding is forever a work-in-progress. Each new hire gets to approach the situation with fresh eyes and give us actionable feedback, so tell us how onboarding worked for you. What should we stop, start or continue doing? How can we pave the road more smoothly for the next hire?