Onboarding

The first month at EGCA, condensed. If you’re reading this on day one — welcome.

Before day 1

If you’re hiring a new engineer, confirm these are ready so day 1 isn’t wasted on IT tickets:

Laptop shipped (macOS or Linux — we don’t support Windows as a dev machine).
@egca.io email + Entra account provisioned.
GitHub access to the company repos (see § GitHub below).
Azure Key Vault access for the engineering vault (via Entra group membership — no separate password).
Added to the Engineering team on Microsoft Teams — at minimum the General, Incidents, and Random channels.
Invited to Cloudflare, Vercel, Azure, Datadog as appropriate to role.
A buddy assigned — usually a mid-level who’ll answer day-to-day questions without friction.

Target: by end of day, you have a local Next.js dev env running.

Install the basics:
- Node via fnm or nvm (use v22 or whatever the project’s .nvmrc says).
- pnpm — corepack enable && corepack prepare pnpm@latest --activate.
- uv for Python — curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh.
- Docker (Docker Desktop on Mac, Docker Engine on Linux) — used for Postgres in every project.
- GitHub CLI — gh auth login.
- Azure CLI — az login --tenant egca.io.
- Wrangler for Cloudflare — pnpm add -g wrangler && wrangler login.
Clone one real project, run pnpm install && pnpm dev, confirm it boots against a local Docker Postgres.
If anything fails for > 30 minutes, ping your buddy. Don’t sit silently.

You’re not expected to be productive in week 1, but you are expected to go end-to-end through the pipeline once.

By end of week 1, you should have:

Read this handbook cover to cover (it’s ~40 minutes).
Read your project’s README.md and its 3 most recently merged PRs.
Picked up a small “good first issue” — typo, copy tweak, small bug, tiny UX fix.
Opened a PR following § Git and § Code Review.
Gotten it merged and deployed to production.

That first shipping cycle teaches you the pipeline faster than any doc.

By end of month 1 you should be able to:

Small team = low friction. Nobody will be annoyed by a well-framed question. Roughly:

Topic	Ask
Stack / architecture decisions	Your tech lead, then the senior engineers.
Product / spec ambiguity	Product owner or the ticket author.
Infra / Azure / Cloudflare	Whoever is on ops this week (post in the Engineering Teams channel).
Access / accounts	IT (the IT Help Teams channel).
”Is this the right way?”	Your buddy first. They remember being new.

We’d rather you ask after 30 minutes stuck than stay stuck for three hours. But frame the question so the person answering can help:

A two-paragraph Teams message beats a “can we hop on a call?” by a mile. Writing it often unblocks you on its own — rubber-duck debugging.

Post in the right Teams channel (Engineering for tech questions) and reply in the thread — don’t start new top-level posts for follow-ups.

Our code lives on GitHub. A new engineer’s checklist:

Send your GitHub handle to your tech lead.
You’ll be added as a collaborator on the repos you need. Accept the invite on github.com.
Set up SSH or a credential helper so git push doesn’t prompt for a password.
gh auth login for the GitHub CLI.
Configure commit signing if your repo requires it (git config --global commit.gpgsign true).

If a repo asks for 2FA — set it up with an authenticator app (Microsoft Authenticator works with the rest of your Entra setup).

Nobody expects you to know everything. Asking is a skill; use it.
Nobody reads the whole handbook up front. Skim it, know where to look.
You will break production. Everyone has. What matters is how you respond — see § Deployment & Ops — Incident response. Calm + communicate + fix.
Feedback loops are short here. We review PRs fast, ship daily, talk openly. Use it.
Push back when you disagree. Small teams die of quiet agreement. Disagree with kindness, commit when the decision is made.