To help you with the transition and make it easy for you to get up to speed as quickly as possible, here's an outline of some things to look at in your first couple of weeks with us. This is not intended to be a complete list and the details may vary somewhat depending on your role but we hope this overview is helpful to give you some structure and place to start digging in.
Some general words of advice:
- Take ample notes
- Ask lots of questions
- Check in regularly
- It's ok to wander
- You're doing great
- Set up your computer and workspace - Work through this guide to setting up Mac OS X for news apps work. If you need additional hardware/software work with your supervisor to make the necessary purchases. You'll also want to spend some time getting your working environment set up. If you're new to remote work we've collected some tips and tools we've found useful. Feel free to add to any of these lists.
- Create/activate all accounts - Your supervisor will be creating accounts for you. We have a list of them here. If you run into anything that's not on the list, add it.
- Read all of the team docs. Create issues for anything that is unclear. If you see immediate areas for improvement, fork the repo, suggest improvements and submit pull requests wherever relevant. Help the next person who joins the team have an easier time getting up to speed. If you're new to using Git, we have a guide for that.
- Schedule meetings with all INN staff members - In your first couple of weeks you'll want to spend a little time with each INN staff member (not just our immediate team) to get to know them, their role with the organization and how your work might overlap. The complete staff list can be found in the staff directory. If you need help making those connections, just ask.
- Collect your notes and thoughts, reflect on your first week and write a blog post on the team blog about what you've learned.
- Read the docs for Largo and our deploy tools. If anything is unclear, create an issue. Propose additions/improvements and submit pull requests wherever relevant. Once you've read through these docs you're likely going to start setting up your local machine to work on our WordPress stuff. Pair with a buddy to get a walkthrough and continue to improve the docs if anything is unclear.
- Familiarize yourself with INN's brand standards They're on dropbox presently. Note any areas for improvement, missing resources, etc.
- Spend some time on each INN member site. There are a lot of them so this is going to take you a while, spread it out over the next couple of weeks. You're not looking for anything in particular but you should at least try to get familiar with what each member does, the topics they cover, what their site does well/less well. Take some notes. Maybe propose some new projects if you notice anything you think we might be able to help members out with.
- Continue meetings with INN staff - try to make sure you've met everyone and spent a little time with them by the end of this week.
- Collect your notes, reflect on the week and write another blog post about what you've learned.
- Take a look at, experiment with and read the docs for our other projects on GitHub. If anything is unclear, broken, in need of an update, etc. create an issue. Propose additions/improvements and submit pull requests wherever relevant.
- Continue spending time on INN member sites. If a particular member interests you, maybe reach out to them and have a quick chat to introduce yourself and learn a little more about them.
- Take opportunities to pair with other teammates on any current project that interests you. You've been focusing a lot on documentation the first couple weeks. Now it's time to really start digging in.
- Collect your notes, reflect, write another blog post about what you've learned. (Notice a pattern?)
- You've probably opened a lot of documentation-related issues on our various project repos as you've been learning. This week take the opportunity to close a few of them.
- Continue spending time on INN member sites. You'll probably complete this this week.
- Continue pairing and learn as much as you can. You'll probably start to spend more time driving as you become more comfortable and get up to speed with our projects and how we work.
- Collect your notes, reflect, yet another blog post.
After the first month or so we hope you're reasonably familiar with how the team works and the projects we're working on. At this point you'll likely start to be assigned work of your own on member/client and internal projects. Continue to ask questions and check in regularly (don't ever stop doing this, really) if anything is unclear or if you need a hand.
Both full-time and part-time employees have a review at 60 days. This is less formal than your annual review but it's still an important opportunity to check in with your supervisor about how things have been going, set goals for the coming months and identify areas for improvement. For bonus-eligible employees this will also be the time to set some goals for the year.