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I'm currently an Engineering Manager at Skutopia looking after our Shipping Platform product vertical.
I'm working to scale our engineering teams, give our current engineers the skills to be our future leaders, as well as promoting a positive culture where we can all learn, develop, and grow.
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The setup During a "Papercut Friday" at SKUTOPIA, I wanted to optimise the startup time of an event sourced service. The setup was as follows: In-memory projections, built every time a NodeJS container starts. A Postgres event store with ~2.5 milli...
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Skutopia has moved to a GitHub Codespaces first environment for developing applications. Codespaces allow us to have a common development environment where problems are solved once and applied for everyone. Onboarding is a breeze as we no longer have...
At Skutopia we provision and manage our cloud infrastructure (GCP) using Pulumi. In the past I have provisioned infrastructure with tools such as CloudFormation (both when it had to be json 😭 and in the more modern yaml structure), Terraform, and no...
At Skutopia, we wanted to get in-front of developer experience as we started to scale. After a vendor selection process we settled on using Swarmia as our platform. Swarmia allows us to have engineering surveys as well as DORA and SPACE metrics all i...
Onboarding can be a stressful time as you join a new company. You are eager to get going while at the same time you need to understand the business and the environment at a level where you can make the right impact. We aim to find a balance to give you the right information at the right time.
Before you join us you will receive an invitation to our people management platform - BambooHR. This will have your profile, your contract, as well as various forms to get you setup and ready to work. There will be a bunch of reading that you can come back to as you get closer to joining us.
A few days out from joining you will receive your itinerary for your first week and the meetings that are lined up. This removes the surprise factor of what your calendar will look like when you turn up on your first day.
The first day will start off with a people and culture induction. You will hear more about the company, how we have evolved to where we are, and more about the working culture we are building.
You will then sit down with IT to get your laptop all up and running, and make sure that any tools you might need are installed and ready to go.
After a full on start to your day you will have the chance to have a checkin with your manager. This is your chance to start getting familia with your manager and building that working relationship. Your manager is there to help answer any questions you might have and give you guidance.
Our Head of Product will take you through the products that we offer. Each product plays an important part of the Skutopia ecosystem. This session will take you through how they tie together to form a cohesive offering for our merchants. You will also get a flavour of the future vision so that you know what we are working towards.
You will get a glimpse of the software architecture for the product that you are working on. We've been sure to keep this fairly high level. We know week one is an overwhelming time. We have designed this session to be the basics of how our systems work. Over time you will get deeper into the weeds.
Your Squad Lead will take you through setting up your development environment. We use GitHub Codespaces to give our engineers a consistent environment. This session will be nice and quick to get things up and running and show you how codespaces works.
Your squad's designer will take you through the product designs and the design system to give you an overview of how we have conformity. Depending on the project you are coming into, you will get a deep dive on the current project and what is coming up.
This is your opportunity to meet your squad team members. This will include product, design and your engineering colleagues. This is a social call to start forming those close relationships and bonds with the people you work the closest to.
We believe in making decisions based on data. Our Head of Data will take you through how the data team works. You will get an understanding around how we extract and transform the data to give us the dashboards and metrics we need to make data driven decisions.
Your manager will prepare an onboarding homepage for you. There will be a few sections to this. The first of which is some general information around the business. This is useful to get a handle on what different acronyms mean, who different people are, and which slack channels you need to pay attention to.
There will then be an engineering deep dive page. This has technical specific information and links to everything we use in engineering. From internal github repos, through to our external tooling such as excalidraw, swarmia, or incident.io. It's your one stop shop when you need pointing in a certain direction.
Most importantly it links out to our internal documentation where you can find information on our company and product vertical tech strategies. There are links to our engineering best practices, SDLC, testing strategies, working methodology.
At the end of the day we feel the best way to learn is to get your hands dirty and write some code. We aim to have you merging code by the end of your first week. We have new joiner friendly tickets ready to go that shouldn't be too much trouble. This gets you into the flow nice and early, allowing you to become familia with the PR process and deployment pipelines. Allowing your confidence to start growing!
We understand onboarding is a pivotal point in the journey for engineers. We have designed a system to give you the info you need, without trying to overwhelm you. There is detailed planning around the sessions and when you have them. Regular checkins from your manager will give you plenty of opportunity to ask questions. We will get your hands dirty with code quickly to get you on top of making changes.