Onboarding a new developer.

A good on-boarding can

• help feel the developer welcomed in the team
• provide the developer an overview about how the teams work, best practices, team culture etc...
• help him find his way around his first project. It's hard to imagine someone new, will be able to figure out everything on his own.
• give faces to names. A face to face engagement is good opportunity for the team to meet the new guy and vice-versa.

What is it about?

• Culture communication and etiquette
• Coding standards
• Internal system and processes
• People and contacts

How to do it?

• Mentoring
• Documentation
• Meetings, lunch
• Pair Programming

Onboarding Checklist

Here is what this checklist may look like.

Before Start day

• Setup Access. SCM, CI/CD, Slack, JIRA etc ...

First day

• Intro Team

First week

• Up to speed into ongoing projects.
• Knowledge sharing.
• Team lunch

First month

• ... and so on

The above is a template to exemplify the idea, You should make your own itinerary that works best for your organisation/team

Although it might take time and effort from the team to prepare this, it is a superb investment in your next star "employee of the month". First impressions matter.

Further reading:

• Atlassian employee onboarding (super detailed)
• Something targetted for remote developers