You want to know how good the engineering culture is — I often get this question a lot and I completely understand why it’s important to know. The time it takes for a developer to be productive on their first day is a good sign that the organization has really thought about the engineering on-boarding experience and indicates the way the organization treats engineering as a whole.
I’ve seen developers take a week before they’re delivering software to customers and I’ve seen developers ship on their first day. Like many other companies — including Github, Basecamp, Stripe, and Airbnb — we aim to be the latter. We believe this is an important part of building a great workplace for engineers.
Like any other startup, Battlefy’s on-boarding process is constantly evolving, but remains based on two principles:
Let’s call this metric, time to getting stuff done (TTGSD).
Though we move fast, that doesn’t mean we don’t take delivering exceptional software to our players, tournament organizers, and global brands seriously. We make sure we have the necessary tooling in place to ensure our engineers have full confidence delivering new features to our users.
In the morning, you’ll be welcomed and introduced to everyone on the team one-by-one so that you’ll get a better understanding of what they do for the company and what projects they are working on. In addition to that, you’ll have access to our internal systems including JIRA, Confluence, and GitHub. Confluence is generally where we store product requirements, meeting notes, and documentation (architecture, technical debt, training materials). JIRA is used for our issue tracking and we use GitHub for source control and code reviews.
From there, you’ll be paired up with another engineer to learn our end-to-end product development process and how our cross functional teams interact to ensure we build the best possible experience for our customers. This includes the whole software delivery lifecycle: brainstorming, designing, building, deploying, and maintaining.
Since we have a huge passion for automation and better delivery practices, we’ve simplified our production deployment process so that as an engineer, you get to focus on product instead of worrying about infrastructure.
Once your engineering partner walks you through the product development process, you’ll go through the development environment setup which typically takes 30 minutes and then you’ll go through your first deployment to production: adding yourself to the Company Team page! This entails creating a feature branch, submitting a pull request with your changes from your feature branch into the develop branch, getting it reviewed by teammates, and then releasing it to production by merging a pull request from develop into master (always deployable at all times).
And that’s it! You’ve been on the team for less than day and you’ve already got the trust and tools to safely deploy your own code to production, and start making an impact in esports.
Cheers,
Jaime Bueza
Thanks to Adam Seckel, John Koob, Jared Daley, Ronald Chen, Feng Wu and Justin Wong for reading drafts of this.
Battlefy is hiring! We value passion and drive but we also believe that diversity is the key to success for every high growth technology startup. We welcome people from all walks of life.
We take care of the people, the products, the profits — in that order.
