Your first month as a software engineer at Easy LMS

Meet your buddy!

We're here to help you, so we immediately assign you a buddy when you join. Your buddy is your first point of contact within the company. They will help you successfully complete your first year and become a full-fledged team member. Your buddy works in the same discipline so that they can assist you with your daily tasks. They will guide you through the month-long onboarding program and assess what you need to perform your job. This means we adjust the program as needed; we don't rigidly adhere to it. Everyone progresses at their own pace, and we stick to yours; there's no right or wrong.

Get to know our company

What do we stand for? What's our vision and mission, and what do we actually do? You probably heard a lot during the application process, and we go over it again in the first few weeks. You'll immediately get to use the product you'll work on by following a couple of short courses in Easy LMS.

You'll have introductory meetings with colleagues from different disciplines

Get to know your colleagues

On your first day, we always take a tour of the office to introduce you to colleagues on-site. Since we work in a hybrid way, you won't see all your colleagues immediately. You'll get to know remote colleagues through online meetings. Our lunch table is, of course, the central place in the office to get to know your new colleagues even better!

Additionally, you'll have introductory meetings with colleagues from different disciplines who explain their role in the company and its connection to yours. What can you approach them for? How can you complement each other? Through these 30-minute conversations, you'll get a good understanding of what we do! And you get to know your colleagues a bit better. Here's an overview of the disciplines you'll be talking to:

• CEO

• CTO

• COO

• Product Development

• Support

• Office Management

• Content Marketing

• Information Security and GDPR

You can test how well you know your colleagues in a fun way with a quiz. We've developed a short quiz within our tool where you have to guess who is who or which characteristic belongs to whom. Can you get a 100% score?

Get to know more about your field of interest

For each discipline, in addition to a general course, there's a specific course. In your case, it's a development course. In this course, we’ll explain how we:

• Use Jira.

• Work test-driven.

• Test.

We also showcase:

• Our code review cycle.

• QA cycle.

• Development cycle.

Afterward, we delve into our development stack. We work with:

• Front-end: React + TypeScript, Storybook for UI testing.

• Back-end: Node.JS, TypeScript + PHP.

• MariaDB (MySQL) and DynamoDB databases.

• AWS.

• Docker.

• GitHub.

• Jenkins for CI/CD.

• Linux/WSL + Windows.

It works well when everyone has the same basic knowledge. For us, and for you, because then you can contribute more quickly. We offer various courses via Codecademy, depending on your background and experience. Typically, we start with a few day courses in JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL, and PHP. This fills up your first and second weeks quickly. You also start reading our holy grail, the book 'Modern Software Engineering' by David Farley. After reading this book, all the pieces of the software engineering puzzle will fall into place!

You'll also immediately participate in our regular routines

From theory to practice 

But this is just the theory. Step by step, we’ll also introduce you to the practical side. You'll soon write your first user story, program a defined task, and conduct code reviews. This often happens in the second or third week. You'll also immediately participate in our regular routines: stand-ups, batch ratings, and retrospectives. After all, experiencing and doing is the fastest way to learn.

In the beginning, you'll also do a lot of pair programming, allowing us to help you understand the infrastructure of our product. We can see how you code and determine what technical depth you still need. We offer that knowledge by giving a workshop or letting you shadow a colleague with that specific knowledge.

Get to know our product

Maybe you secretly signed up for a trial but have little experience with our LMS. That's okay. We'll quickly make you an expert! In the first week, you'll get a tool demonstration from one of our consultants. We also set aside time for you to play around with the tool. We’ll ask you to create a short course and take an exam on your passion or something else that greatly interests you. It's good practice for you, and it's fun for us because it tells us more about you.

Get to know all the tools we use

In addition to our own product, we use many other software tools. We don't expect you to master them all within a month. Trust us; you'll need more time for that. We’ll start with the most important tools, explaining the basics:

• LastPass

• Jira

• Confluence

• Slack

• Resource Guru

• Docker

• Github

• PHPstorm

• Jenkins

You'll notice that the more you work with them, the quicker you'll pick them up. Even the advanced options will eventually become second nature.

A safe workspace

This is perhaps the foundation for working well: your workspace. We arrange almost everything in advance, but your desk and chair height needs to be adjusted on-site. A good working posture is important to prevent physical problems. We consider this part of creating a safe working environment. Just like knowing who to approach with questions, improvements, or problems. To make our workspace safe, we also make clear:

• What to do in case of emergencies.

• How to deal with psychosocial work pressure.

• How we handle sensitive data from others.

We’ll introduce you to this through an online course that you take in the first week.

Our onboarding program in a nutshell!

Your onboarding program will look something like this:

Week 1

• Onboarding courses: company, colleagues, development, safe workspace

• Programming courses: JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, SQL

• Demo tool

• Introduction meetings with colleagues

Week 2

• Continue programming courses: JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, SQL

• Continue introduction meetings with colleagues

• First steps in practice - involvement in daily routine

Week 3

• Reading the book 'Modern Software Engineering'

• Involvement in daily routine

• Technical deepening

Week 4

• Continue reading the book ‘Modern Software Engineering’

• Involvement in daily routine

• Technical deepening

Time to celebrate 

When you’ve learned new things, you should be proud and celebrate! Have you completed our onboarding program successfully? That's a fantastic achievement! We’ll celebrate your accomplishments with a champagne moment in the spotlight!