Fascination Street #15

Writing for the week of August 22, 2025

Some time has passed since I last posted. Several things have happened since. New job. Authoring a book. Some travel, including earlier this week to see NIN in Chicago. Trent put on a superb show. Extremely well produced.

Back to the new job thing. Any time I start somewhere new, I pay close attention to the onboarding process. Is it an organized process? Is there a buddy system? Are there proper introductions? Or are you just thrown into the deep end?

Maybe because I am an empath, I always wanted to provide a smooth onboarding experience for any of my new teammates. I wanted to make sure they could get the app or services running locally. I wanted to make sure they understood the system design. I also wanted to make sure they had links and access to every tool we used.

While at Nike, I wanted to introduce a pattern for the teams I managed that included installing a CLI. The CLI would be used by the time and kept up to date. It would provide common things like links to the JIRA board. Just type jira , for example. Or documentation to go to Confluence of Notion or whatever tool we were using. Type repo and go to the repo in GitHub. Type status to see the current CI/CD pipeline status. Type staging to go to the staging environment. Or production. Maybe the system being built had a complex Docker or Kubernetes setup, so type system or something to start the system without having to remember parameters. Maybe env to set the needed environment variables. You get the idea. All a new team member had to do was install the CLI and explore to have access to everything. The other bonus is that it would be the single place to automate the daily tasks the team performs. I thought it would be a useful way to onboard. However, I never prioritized building it. It’s still an idea I would like to try with a team.

Most organizations I have joined neglect establishing an onboarding process. It takes engineers, on average, about 6 months to really become comfortable and productive. Imagine bringing that down to 2 weeks! Most of the time, just running the system locally so an engineer can start to contribute takes longer than that on most teams.

If you have successful onboarding practices, I would love to hear them. Ping me.

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Links

• https://github.com/ankane/ruby-polars - want to get familiar with Polars but stick to Ruby, this is a great example of Ruby being used for data things
• https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/comments/1lznx5v/favorite_shortcut_youve_made/ - great mentions of useful Siri Shortcuts

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Music

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA7ijNkPZRk&list=RDDA7ijNkPZRk&start_radio=1 - Mentioned earlier, the NIN show was the best production I have ever seen in a large venue show, the two stages, the real-time video, just amazing

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A couple of promotions each week. First, use my invite link to try Warp as your terminal. It’s fast and has some great features. I’m not affiliated with them at all, just really like it. Also, check out my project–Schemabook, especially if you work in an organization that wants to get organized around defining data through contracts and collaboration. Lastly, I’m writing a book about learning Rust if you are familiar with Ruby. Stay tuned. As always, you can connect with me more at https://mikekrisher.com.