Here's my checklist (originally included in an email sent out to my mailing list - <a href="https://softwareclown.com" rel="nofollow">https://softwareclown.com</a>):<p>Understand the big picture direction of the organization, team, and product I’m working on: management, marketing, sales, and engineering.<p>* Talk to relevant managers about where we’re going, and what they’d consider success or failure. Also a chance to meet managers I didn’t talk to during interview process.<p>* See if anyone’s done a pre-mortem, or if not try to informally or formally do one: “it’s one year in the future and the project has failed. What did we do wrong?” Usally I’ve started mentally creating a list of big picture risks, but many of those are probably irrelevant, and I’m probably missing quite a few.<p>* Learn meeting schedule, start forming opinions about existing ones (useful/needs improvement/useless) and what meetings might be missing.<p>* Get to know co-workers: names, roles, who knows what.<p>* Wander around introducing myself, and asking people what they are working on.<p>* Figure out lunch and snack culture.<p>* Join social chat rooms / email lists.<p>Set up work environment.<p>* Standing desk, with keyboard and monitor correct height.<p>* Kinesis Advantage keyboard.<p>* Mat for standing desk.<p>* Install Linux on laptop.<p>* Editor configuration (using my dotfiles repo).
* Setup email, chat, other communication methods.<p>Start learning the development process, code base, tool chain, and relevant technologies.<p>* Get code checked out, figure out how to build and run it.<p>* Figure out how to file tickets.<p>* Get smallest possible commit merged (fixing a typo, say).<p>* Improve or write documentation for the above three, for
the benefit of future developers.<p>* Next smallest code change: improve code quality by adding a linter, or setup EditorConfig.<p>* Start work on a small, real feature or bug fix.<p>* Order (and expense!) books covering topics I don’t know enough about.<p>Logistics.<p>* Health and dental insurance.<p>* Retirement account.<p>* Bring relevant legal documentation first day (passport / birth certificate).<p>* Figure out best time to leave for work.<p>* Figure out bike parking.