Shieldpay welcomed Sam to the Technology team and penned our first Engineering blog post to outline our Engineering onboarding process and how it helps newcomers hit the ground running.

What is Engineer onboarding?

Engineer onboarding is the first step that a Software Engineer will take in their new role. The process integrates a new engineer into the team and will help them get acquainted with company culture, annual leave policies, Codebase/coding standards and everything you will need to get you off to a great start.

Successful onboarding can make or break a team, a lack of sufficient onboarding is what fuels many problems down the line. Getting it right is important for any company, and we’re very aware of that here at Shieldpay so aim to be as thorough as possible for our new starters.

Leading up to my first day

Before starting my new role there were, of course, some documents to sign. I received a lovely welcome box of chocolates, which was a nice touch, alongside all of the peripherals I had asked for; the laptop was another story.

My laptop was scheduled to be delivered before my start date to ensure I had all my equipment ready. The Shieldpay team informed me of the expected delivery date, I waited all day for my laptop to arrive and it was nowhere to be seen. At around 3 pm, after waiting all day, I went to check outside just in case it had been left on my doorstep, and to my displeasure, I found a red coloured “You were not in” ticket left by Royal Mail. I quickly remedied the missing laptop and had it rescheduled and delivered to me the following day. A small bump in the road in an otherwise positive start.

Being as impatient as I am and everyone knows I love a new piece of tech, I just had to get it out of the box and get it ready for the following week of my new role.

The first day

On my first day, I was excited to get started. My team lead guided me through everything I needed to know during my onboarding, which made the process that much easier to understand, so thanks Arran!

We went through the steps of creating pull requests, the deployment process during development, company culture, time-off policies and lots of the standards I would be working from going forward. There was a lot to take in, for instance, the system I’ll be contributing to is built using Monorepository Architecture which lead us to go through each service, and how all of the services worked within the system itself. Despite there being a lot to go through, Arran was great at breaking it up into bite-sized pieces for easy consumption.

My first two weeks

The first week of any new role is always met with nerves but also excitement. I can say I quickly got over a lot of the initial nerves and I was soon introduced to a large portion of the Shieldpay team.

Introduction meetings had been arranged for me over the first two weeks which gave me a great opportunity to ask the teams who they were and find out a little about what they did and where I would tie into all of it. Overall, I may have spent around 14 hours on calls that week but it was incredibly beneficial to have met so many wonderful people and feel so welcomed.

After previously going through the system services and where everything could be found on my first day, we began diving into the libraries and programming languages we would be using from day to day. This includes but is not limited to; Typescript, Jest for unit and integration testing, Serverless framework to define our AWS resources, however, new services will be defined using AWS CDK going forward, and Circle CI for our deployment process.

In any new role, it’s advised to take it slow and steady to not feel overwhelmed. Being the impatient kind of person I am, I scrapped that concept and merged my first contribution by day 2 which felt great. It was small, but nice to see the process and everything Arran and I had gone over in practice. This was only the beginning.

Wrapping things up

Overall, I couldn’t be happier with the onboarding process here at Shieldpay, even with lots to learn like any other job I would do it all again.

From the hours of meetings with some incredible people to code reviews, the onboarding gave me exactly what I was after and a strong indication of what to expect for the rest of my days here.