Onboarding

This gives ideas about how onboarding can go. This is just one checklist, talk to your supervisor and team to see where to focus and how it can be adapted to you.

For concrete technical steps to take to get access, see the rse-internal-wiki onboarding page (link not here).

Upstream onboarding guide: https://www.aalto.fi/en/services/onboarding-guide-for-new-employee

First week

In the first week you are still getting familiar with things. Most of your time is spent shadowing other support sessions in SciComp garage, finding our basic collaboration tools (chat, Google Drive, etc. how meetings work, etc.) In general, follow everyone around, sit in on things, ask questions.

Material:

  • First-pass reading this site. At this point, you don’t have to read everything in full depth (just know what’s here), but you should do a complete reading within the first month.

First month

During this time you should go into deeper into our standard information and procedures and build a theoretical knowledge of how things work. (This is very different from practical knowledge, which you can only get by working on things with others in real projects.) You and your supervisor should find some sort of projects you can begin focusing on.

The types of things you may do are divided into different roles (Roles intro), which are made this way so you don’t have to start working on everything at once - talk with your supervisor to figure out where you want to focus.

As for actual computing skills, there is a plenty to learn, but this is what you know how to study on your own. What you learn here depends on what projects you may have and what your interests are, and will be very customized to everyone individually. Some of the most important topics are below.

Material:

  • Everything on this site in depth.

  • Triton cluster: Triton specialties - good to read the tutorials at least to see what we tell others, plus browse other pages that seem relevant.

  • Research Software Engineers: RSE team procedures as shown to users.

  • Data: Data storage information for users.

  • CodeRefinery lessons (git-intro, git-collab, documentation, reproducible research, etc). CodeRefinery are like the basic skills behind a lot of our software stuff.

  • Much more that you can find scattered around this site.

First three months

Hopefully, by this time you have some projects and at least one of them is successful. You can also continue going in-depth for some of the things above.

From this site and others, you can find plenty of stuff to continue reading, but a lot will based on what you need for your projects.

You should avoid the trap of doing too many things medium-well. Work with your supervisor and the team to set your priorities, communicate to customers what you can and can’t do, and focus on that.

First year