Sounds like your team needs better onboarding documentation. Make creating those docs your responsibility so that the next person that joins doesn't need to do what you're going to need to do.
Start by having someone on the team give you a brain dump.
Record it. It doesn't need to be high quality. Use Quicktime
and your laptop's webcam.
After the braindump, write out everything that was said and make the following diagrams:
- Architectural diagram showing the components involved.
- Infrastructure diagram that shows where things run.
- Deployment pipeline that shows how code gets from git commit to production.
- Data flow diagrams for the most common usage patterns. This one might come a bit later as you're more hands on in coding.
Show the diagrams to your team members as you create them and ask them to verify that it's accurate. If it's not, understand why and fix your diagram.
Add the above to your onboarding docs. If none exist, create it somewhere.
Add a page to onboarding docs that describe how to access logs.
Add a page that describes how monitoring in the system works.
Add a page that will act as an index for recipes on how to do useful things. From that page, create a bunch of useful scripts that you gather as you learn stuff daily. Encourage others to do the same.
I think you get the picture. Add a page for everything you need to know in order to be productive. Think about all the things you knew how to do in your previous position. Try to document how to do all those things in your new position.
Soon, before you know it, you'll be productive and you'll enable your team to be able to onboard new team members more efficiently.
In addition, write code and review PRs. Ask a lot of questions in PRs. Investigate how things work. Get curious.
Start by having someone on the team give you a brain dump. Record it. It doesn't need to be high quality. Use Quicktime and your laptop's webcam.
After the braindump, write out everything that was said and make the following diagrams:
- Architectural diagram showing the components involved.
- Infrastructure diagram that shows where things run.
- Deployment pipeline that shows how code gets from git commit to production.
- Data flow diagrams for the most common usage patterns. This one might come a bit later as you're more hands on in coding.
Show the diagrams to your team members as you create them and ask them to verify that it's accurate. If it's not, understand why and fix your diagram.
Add the above to your onboarding docs. If none exist, create it somewhere.
Add a page to onboarding docs that describe how to access logs.
Add a page that describes how monitoring in the system works.
Add a page that will act as an index for recipes on how to do useful things. From that page, create a bunch of useful scripts that you gather as you learn stuff daily. Encourage others to do the same.
I think you get the picture. Add a page for everything you need to know in order to be productive. Think about all the things you knew how to do in your previous position. Try to document how to do all those things in your new position.
Soon, before you know it, you'll be productive and you'll enable your team to be able to onboard new team members more efficiently.
In addition, write code and review PRs. Ask a lot of questions in PRs. Investigate how things work. Get curious.