People ops · 3 min read
Your first week
What to expect on day one and through week one, and why the goal is momentum.
Welcome aboard. The goal of your first week is simple: get you comfortable, get you set up, and get you shipping something small and real. We're not going to hand you a two-week reading list and disappear. You learn this place by doing things in it, so we'll get you doing things quickly. For how we run onboarding on our end, and what we owe you, see onboarding.
Day one
Day one is mostly about getting the machinery working and meeting the people. Expect it to be low-drama on purpose.
- Get your tools. Accounts, access, hardware, the GitHub org, and the Discord where most of the day-to-day happens. If something's missing or broken, say so; sorting out access is normal first-day friction, not a you problem.
- Meet your people. You'll get introduced to the crew and pointed at who owns what. We're small, so this is short, and there's no org chart to memorize.
- Start reading the handbook. Not all of it, not today. Start with working here and the values, then pull up specific pages when you have a specific question. The handbook is the source of truth; when you're unsure how something works, it's the first place to look.
Nobody expects you to be productive on day one. If you end the day with a working setup and a rough sense of who's who, that's a good day one.
Through the week
The rest of the week is about turning "set up" into "moving." The thing we care about most is that you ship something small before the week is out.
It doesn't matter how small. A doc fix, a tiny bug, a rough edge you noticed and smoothed. The point isn't the size of the change, it's going through the whole loop once: find the thing, make the change, get it reviewed, ship it. That single trip through the pipeline teaches you more about how we work than any onboarding deck could.
Ship something in week one
Your first-week win isn't a big feature. It's proof that you can move an idea all the way to shipped here. Small and real beats large and hypothetical.
Ask anything
You will not understand everything in week one. Nobody does, and pretending otherwise just slows you down, so ask. There are no dumb questions in your first month, and honestly not many after that either.
If you're stuck for more than a little while, reach out instead of grinding alone. Asking early is a sign you're paying attention. We'd much rather answer the "obvious" question now than untangle a wrong assumption later.
When you spot something confusing, write it down. An unclear handbook or setup doc is a bug, and you're the person best placed to catch it, because you're seeing it fresh. Fix it or flag it. Improving the on-ramp for the next person is real, valued work.
What we're actually after
Momentum. Not a perfect mental model of the whole system, not every corner of the codebase mapped, just the sense that you can find your footing and start contributing. Everything deeper fills in as you go.
You were hired because we think you can do the work and we want to do it with you. Week one is just where that starts. If you finish it feeling oriented, a little productive, and comfortable asking questions, you're exactly where you should be.