When joining a new internet company, there might be lots of things need to be done to get ready for taking new challenges. These include both culture and tech preparation. in this post, we would focus on how to prepare the first day technically.

The first thing to do is to get your laptop or your work machine up, these involves lots of tool setup and accesses. Normally there are three major task categories.

Access

As an engineer, there are lots of accesses needed to access different resources within the company. Normally, you would have the user accounts created first to access emails, slacks etc which are not a big concern. Below is a list of accesses which may be needed in general:

• VPN: for accessing intranet resources, this is especially useful for those conduct remote work
• SSO: for accessing internal applications as there are lots of different systems there
• Cloud service: many companies are using cloud services to host servers and other resources like RDS, there is some access needed
• Server access: there might be cases where engineers need direct access to the servers for some debugging or testing purpose
• Code repository: for accessing project related code
• Wiki workspace: for accessing work related wikis
• Configuration management: normally there would be configuration management tool used for application service, to read the configuration or update the configuration, access is required

Tool

The next major thing is to install various kinds of tools which are needed for daily work. They include development tools, testing tools and more. 

Below are a check list of tools which we may need to install.

• git
• different languages(go, php, java etc)
• mysql
• redis
• kafka
• postman: for API testing
• docker
• Google authenticator: for MFA authentication
• vpn

Development environment

This major task is to set up the development environment so that you are ready to start to work. It involves getting familiar with the project repositories and code structures and how a change is developed and delivered.

The items to take care of:

• IDE installation
• Clone project code repository
• Read through code
• Get familiar with the frameworks used and how a new service is created and the code structure
• Run testcases
• Create an example service and play around with it
• Get first change checked in, the MR flow, branching strategy etc can be learned here
• Trigger CI/CD pipeline and get the change deployed on testing/staging/development environment
• Check logs to see whether changes are deployed and get familiar with logging search platform

With all these done, you should be ready to go and start enjoy the new challenges ahead.

Note: The post will be updated constantly with new items.