Onboarding Checklist

NOTE
This is currently a Work In Progress

This is a curated task list aimed at developers joining the team. It covers general tasks that everyone should complete, followed by role-specific checklists for software developers, data engineers, and DevOps engineers.

General (everyone)

People and access

Meet with your technical lead to understand the team structure and current priorities
Meet with the product manager to understand the product vision and roadmap
Create a GitHub account (or use an existing one) and ask your technical lead to get you added to the organisation with the correct permissions — remove any personal access tokens from an existing account before using it
Get access to the relevant Slack channels — ask your technical lead if you are unsure which ones

Reading

Read the Planning Data Handbook
Read the key development principles
Review the deploy and release procedure
Review the Pull Request best practices
Review the CI/CD strategy
Read through Onboarding in Data Operations for a broad overview of the platform and the questions worth asking as you get started

Software Developer (frontend and/or backend)

Machine setup

[ ] Run through the Set Up for Mac tutorial to install the base-level dependencies needed across most of our repositories

Key repositories to clone

[ ] Planning Data platform — the main website
[ ] Submit service — tools to help data providers submit URLs for collection

Get the applications running

[ ] Read the Check and Provide overview for what the service does and how it fits the platform, then the architecture guide for how the application is put together. Setup and run instructions are in the repository readme

Best practices and conventions

[ ] Review the best practices documentation — all projects should follow these
[ ] Confirm you can start a service using the standard make targets:
```
make init
make run
```

Data Engineer

Machine setup

[ ] Run through the Set Up for Mac tutorial to install the base-level dependencies needed across most of our repositories

Key reading

[ ] Review the data architecture overview
[ ] Work through the Data Operations Manual — pay particular attention to the Key Concepts and How-To Guides sections

Key repositories to clone

[ ] Digital Land Python — the core CLI and data processing library
[ ] Makerules — shared make targets used across data pipeline repositories
[ ] Specification — dataset specifications and schemas
[ ] AWS Batch Docker — Dockerfiles and entrypoints for batch processing tasks

Get oriented

[ ] Run through the Running a Collection tutorial
[ ] Confirm you can set up a repository locally using:
```
make init
make test
```

DevOps

Key reading

[ ] Review the infrastructure documentation in full, including deployment diagrams, code structure, security approach, and how-to guides
[ ] Review the CI/CD strategy in depth — you will own and maintain these pipelines
[ ] Review the alerting and monitoring strategy
[ ] Review the architecture checklist

Key repositories

[ ] Clone the infrastructure repository and review the structure with your technical lead — this is the primary repo you will work in
[ ] Review the Makerules repository as it underpins the CI/CD workflows across all other repositories
[ ] Review the AWS Batch Docker repository

Access and tooling

[ ] Set up AWS Vault for secure credential management
[ ] Confirm access to the relevant AWS environments with your technical lead