The Developer Relations team (aka devrel) is a fine mix of different roles that each has a clear impact on our team's goal. With that in mind, most onboarding processes will differ from one type of role to the other, but here are some common things that all members of this team needs to accomplish when they start at Mindee.
Before you start your first day, @fharper should have created all the accounts and give you all the access you need to do your job. You may have a lot of emails from day 1, but don't panic if you don't know all the tools we are using, we'll take time together to go through those. Here is a list of devrel specific access or accounts you should have:
- GitHub within the devrel team;
- Orbit account;
- Readme account;
- WordPress account.
P.S.: if you are missing access to some of these services or from the common ones, please let @fharper know
During your time at Mindee, Fred's job is to remove road blocks, and help you being successful, so never hesitate to ask him any questions or share concerns with him. You can read more about working with him as a person, and as a manager (TDB, need to publish my manager README).
In theory, if you reach that point, you have or planned to meet with 10 people from different departments. If there are people you didn't have 1:1 within our team, it's time to schedule a 30 minutes call with them. It's the perfect opportunity to learn about each other background, and share about your role at Mindee.
Our department works a bit differently from the other departments at Mindee: mostly everything we do is public. Take the time to read the main section of our devrel repository.
For now the repository is quite empty, but we will slowly define our processes, write down some ideas/tasks and everything needed to be successful with our community as internally.
Everyone in our team should introduce themselves to our community, even if your role is less front facing. It's a way to let our community know that we care about them, and that we are there to serve them. Let's be honest, it's also a way to get more content on our blog. Here is Fred's as an example.
Once it's published, share it in our Slack community with a one or two sentences about what you'll be doing here.
The next step is to try the product a lot more than what you did before or during your interview process: use one or two APIs from the APIs Store, and create your own API using the API Builder. Start by trying the product by yourself, with the help of the documentation only. The idea is to give you the same experience as any of our customers. During that time, take notes of everything that:
- is not clear in the documentation;
- bugs or UI/UX issues you had;
- ideas you have about the product or the documentation.
Once you search the documentation and you still don't know how to do something, ask away, but remember, take note of the problems you had. If you weren't able to do something, it probably means our users may have the same issue.
At a minimum, you should try the Expense Receipts to understand the foundation of our service. After that, you should create your own API using the API Builder to grasp the full potential of Mindee.
If you are on an M1 MacBook, you may not be able to make docTR works for now: we are working on the setup process
DocTR (Document Text Recognition) is our open source OCR. It is the engine running under Mindee (soon). We don't make money directly from open sourcing it, but it's a way to give back to our community, and let's be honest, a Trojan horse. Since we are the principal maintainer of this project, it's nice that you know a little about it, even if it may not be a focus of yours.
Now that you've accomplished all steps common for all new hires, and everyone knew in our team, it's time to focus on items that are specific to your job at Mindee: