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Shorebird Handbook

Onboarding

Welcome to Shorebird! We’re extremely glad you’re here.

This guide is here to walk you through your first (days).

If you have any problems, please email Eric!

Days before

  • You should get an email from Rippling after signing your offer letter. This will include instructions on how to set up your Rippling account and thus begin the digital parts of the onboarding process.

  • Rippling will also walk you through electing benefits (in the US that includes medical, dental, vision and life insurance as well as 401k) and thus setting up payroll deductions for your first payroll.

  • Eric will reach out to set up a meeting where we walk through this doc and also order you any hardware you might need on day one.

    Our customers are primarily on Windows and targeting Android devices. You will eventually want access to a Windows device, even if it’s not your primary device. If you’re more comfortable on a Mac or Linux, that’s fine for now, but most of us will likely have machines matching what our customers use over time.

Day you join

Accounts

  • Rippling should have offered you a chance to pick your GSuite username as part of your offer paperwork. That account should be enabled before you start on your first day, you should get an email to your personal account.
  • You will use your existing GitHub account, but you will be added to the Shorebird organization. This is currently manual (we’ve not set up Rippling to do it): https://github.com/orgs/shorebirdtech/people
  • You will use your existing Discord account, but you will be added to the “Birder” role on our Discord server. We could automate this with a Discord Linked Role but haven’t yet. Server Settings > Roles > Birder > Add Member
  • There are roles as part of our Google Cloud setup which you will need to be added to manually by Eric after joining. We’ll sort that out as part of getting your local dev setup working (and hopefully make a list here).

Communication

  • As noted above, you will be added to the “Birder” role on Discord and you will have moderation powers on Discord. As a Birder, you’ll see our (few) private company channels and customer channels as well as the public ones.
  • You should consider muting Discord, except for @mentions. If Discord ends up too noisy, we’ll find something quieter for internal communication.
  • Discord is completely public. So far that’s been great, but the public internet also has a long history of not always being a great place. You should not feel any obligation to accept DMs on Discord, or use your real name or likeness. Although so far most of our communications default to public if you prefer to communicate in our private channels that’s also fine. Similarly, unwanted attention and spam on Discord are violations of our policies, please do not hesitate to ask in private channels for assistance removing Discord visitors.
  • Current patterns have involved a most-days sync over VC and brief end-of-day updates in stand-up. I expect these to evolve over time as we grow.
  • You have an email address, but so far haven’t needed them much. #dev-chatter is where the constant back-and-forth is currently happening.
  • You have a calendar, but also don’t plan to use it a ton. Eric has meetings with the outside world, but the rest of the company shouldn’t need to meet much yet. Eric’s calendar is public to the company should you ever need it.

Planning

Forms

  • There are a few tax forms required to fill out on your first day. In the US that’s W-4 and W-9. Rippling will help you take care of this. If you have an iPhone you can use the “Notes” app to scan the signed documents as PDFs. Android likely has something similar.

Finances

  • For US employees, paychecks are delivered every 2 weeks. Rippling should have offered you direct deposits. Let Eric know if you have any trouble getting set up.
  • For EOR employees, paychecks vary according to the country you are in. Check Deel’s FAQ to check the specific payment schedule for your country.

Code

  • Once you’ve been added to the Shorebird organization on GitHub, you should clone the internal _shorebird repo. It will automatically clone the public repo shorebird for you as a submodule.

    Terminal window
    git clone git@github.com:shorebirdtech/_shorebird.git
    cd _shorebird
    git submodule init
    git submodule update

Product

  • Please try the product (if you haven’t already). We are here to build something people want. What have you seen customers need in trying to use Flutter/Dart? We should build that. We keep a list of customer pain in the Handbook, please feel free to add to it.
  • While your eyes are still fresh, you are encouraged to write down any frictions you encounter in the product. Anything you see, likely was seen by 100s of customers and ignored, but we should fix it. You’ll find a folder in Google Drive where others have written friction logs if you wish to feel inspired.

Please edit the handbook

  • I’m sure there is a ton missing from this onboarding guide and the handbook more generally. Please send at least one PR to the handbook. I’m sure you learned things through onboarding the next person should know.