Release Engineer Onboarding

Welcome to the Release team! This document will guide you through release onboarding tasks to make your start here at Sourcegraph as smooth as it can be. Make sure you’ve read and completed the general engineering onboarding guide.

Release Onboarding Checklist

Week 1

Goals

Tasks

If you need access to any system, reach out to your peers in #team-releases on Slack.

Week 2

Goals

  • Develop a high-level understanding of our product.
  • Participate in our team meetings and discussions.
  • Get to know your team.
  • Work towards closing one issue.

Tasks

  • Familiarise yourself with the internal infrastructure at Sourcegraph and ownership areas.
  • Read through the deployments types presentation
  • Schedule a 1 on 1 meeting with each of the engineers in the team
  • Set up a local environment. This will be your other test environment. If you get stuck, just post in the #chat-dev Slack channel. You will often want to run Sourcegraph locally when you are troubleshooting or testing.
  • Add discussion items to the weekly sync doc.

By the end of your first month, the following will be true

Goals

  • Confidently deploy Sourcegraph via all supported deployment methods, and understand when a customer would use one over the others.
  • Begin diving into and improving technical documentation and processes.
  • Understand how Sourcegraph is released.
  • Confidently contributing to and closing team issues

Tasks

  • Review the Sourcegraph install docs and make any appropriate updates.
  • Shadow the release captain during the release process. Point out things that don’t make sense, ask questions, in order to help us improve the process.
  • Take on new issues, and pair with other engineers.

By the end of your second month, the following will be true

Goals

  • You will have assisted customer engineering and customer support, taken ownership of any distribution tasks and resolved them.
  • Made improvements to our processes and how we deploy Sourcegraph.

Tasks

  • Take on the @infra-support rotation and pair with the customer facing teams to resolve issues.
  • Identify inefficiencies and raise issues to fix them

By the end of your third month, the following will be true

Goals

  • Mentoring direct team members and engineers in Customer Engineering and Customer Support
  • Contribute to long term team goals

Tasks

  • Develop any new material required to help others level up and understand our product
  • Add to the team’s planning