The Best Way To Onboard Developers For Any Project

Every developer, from those just starting their careers to the most experienced tech leads, know the pain of joining a project and attempting to quickly learn it.

In today’s newsletter, we’re going to explore the difficulties of developer onboarding from the perspective of the developer and then the company, along with a solution I’ve found to easily speed up the onboarding process.

Let’s dive in.

Developers need details

Every project is unique. It has its own complexities, best practices, and reasons for decisions being made. Even with great documentation, which is hard to come by, becoming efficient and productive on a new project takes time.

Specific details are required that document decisions and implementations. The purpose of this is so that any new team member, or an existing team member looking for a refresher, can quickly get up to speed and become productive on the project.

Every team wants to be productive and every developer wants to provide value as quickly as possible. We all know the feeling of your first few days and weeks on a project, hitting your head against a wall, attempting to figure out how to do the most basic of things.

Nobody likes that.

Onboarding is expensive

For software development companies, developers are typically your most expensive team members.

This means that any unnecessary loss of time spent with onboarding, results in a loss of income for the company and potential project details. For this reason, many companies emphasize proper documentation, which I fully support as it’s incredibly important and useful.

However, writing good documentation takes time away from creating project-features. Documentation also needs to be maintained and curated as the project continues. All of this takes time away from writing code, which essentially means it’s an investment. An investment in rather writing documentation now so that later, the existing team and new members are easily able to reference and learn more about the system.

While that is a healthy approach to take, what if there was a better way? A way that doesn’t require investing time in writing documentation, yet provides more answers and explanations that written documentation could ever provide?

That’s where Tabnine comes in. If you haven’t heard of them, I suggest reading this previous issue of the newsletter where I explain why Tabnine is the best AI coding assistant.

The onboarding agent

Tabnine recently released their Onboarding Agent, one of the latest offerings in an already vast library of features.

The Onboarding Agent acts as a guide for any project that you and your team may be working on. It can provide a comprehensive overview of key project elements, including runnable scripts, dependencies, and overall structure.

The Onboarding Agent addresses all the challenges we’ve spoken about head-on, by giving developers instant access to essential information about the project. It can offer a high-level summary of key elements and even suggest follow-up questions.

This is the answer we’ve all been looking for.

How it works

The Onboarding Agent integrates into the Tabnine Chat, and can be accessed through a simple command (/onboarding). When triggered, the agent will return a summary of the project so that developers can quickly gain an understanding of what they’re working with.

Beyond that, the Onboarding Agent is incredibly intuitive. It doesn’t throw heaps of information at you which is an eye-sore and time consuming to read, but rather guides you through a series of essential details where you can choose your own path to find the information that you’re needing.

This approach, coupled with its suggested follow-up questions, makes it incredibly easy to gain perspective on the project or gather the details for the task at hand.

You can see how effective and fast the onboarding process can now be. This will allow developers to quickly gain context on the project, allow teams to become more productive and allow companies to save money.

I reached out to Tabine directly, to thank them for their great product and they were kind enough to give me a 30% discount code for you to use. How amazing is that? Follow this link to get your discount and start reaping the rewards of Tabnine today.

See you again next week.

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