IxDF Open Handbook

Onboarding ​

Welcome aboard!

We know you’re amazing because you’re here (otherwise, you wouldn’t be here). Congrats: You've landed one of the greatest jobs in the world! 🎉

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Now it’s time to get you up to speed with all the things you need to know about your role at the IxDF and your day-to-day work as a developer.

Before you start, please ensure that you know your mentor (onboarding buddy) to make your onboarding process smooth and easy.

Contribute to our documents ​

From here on, you will read a lot of documents in different places. Your first contribution to IxDF is to help us make those documents as perfect as humanly possible and your fresh look is invaluable. We don't expect you to spend too much time and feel pressured, however you can:

  1. Fix broken links, invalid/obsolete statements, typos, incorrect instructions, etc. Don't be afraid to commit your changes 🙂
  2. Share your feedback with your onboarding buddy

Plan ​

  1. To start, head over to 🔒 IxDF Handbook Course and go through Lesson 1 and Lesson 2 where the onboarding is explained.
  2. Set up and know your collaboration tools.
  3. Know our expectations from you and your work.
  4. Get closer to coding: Setup your 🔒 working environment (private repository link) — It’s time-consuming (2-3 hours), so don't wait. While your tools are being downloaded/installed, you can continue with the list.
  5. Never stop learning 📖. Go through our library and create a plan to acquire every bit of knowledge there. Once you have a plan, please discuss it with your mentor. (Are you full-stack? Then please open both links☀):
  6. If you have any issues accessing the platform, company culture course or our collaboration tools, please ping the Member Experience team (@member-experience-team) via Slack (#onboarding-buddy-chat), so they can assist you. By this point, you should have already completed lesson 0 of the IxDF Onboarding & Company Culture course, so now you may continue with the rest of the lessons.
  7. Go through our guides:
    1. Scrum
    2. 🔒 Git Flow
    3. Setup Xdebug
  8. How to get domain knowledge
  9. Coding (finally! 🎉)
    1. 🔒 File-naming conventions
    2. 🔒 Contributing standards
    3. 🔒 Platform glossary
    4. Architecture (Are you full-stack? You know what to do 😊)
  10. 🔒 Setup your IDE for the project.

Happy reading/hacking!

What’s next? ​

Are you ready for new challenges? Great!

Your onboarding buddy should prepare a number of tasks for your smooth onboarding to the codebase. You will be assigned to your first GitHub issues, make your first contribution to our codebase, and create your first PR — a lot of exciting stuff!

Your first GitHub issues will be tasks that take you through some core sub-systems of our codebase. That will give you a better overview of what these sub-systems do and the state of the code within each sub-system (e.g. what’s the amount of technical debt versus up-to-date code in a given system). Don’t be alarmed if some of the issues will lead you into areas of the codebase where you find technical-debt or spaghetti code. That’s intentional, so you get exposed to both great code and technical debt.

May the Force be with you!

Provide feedback and present your progress ​

In a few weeks, you’ll have a chance to look back at your progress within the IxDF. The entire development team will be very excited to hear your feedback. You'll meet very often with your onboarding buddy, so you'll have a good opportunity to ask for directions, and new issues, get answers for your questions, and get feedback. Here's a list of things you can share with your onboarding buddy or your colleagues:

  • Coding: What have you finished and deployed to production that is now used by hundreds or thousands of people?
  • Learning: What is your progress on consuming our library? Do you find them effective?
  • Domain: What have you learned about the IxDF and our platform? How can you help improve the most critical parts of our platform?
  • Culture: Can you list our vision, mission, and core values? What can you do to help IxDF accomplish its audacious goals?

🦄