My experience joining Plastiq – Trideep

Starting a new job can be exhilarating and challenging. This is even more so for engineering positions. Not only are you starting a new role with new teammates but also potentially learning a lot of new skills. Having made this journey, I wrote this blog to document what the ride feels like and how you can set yourself up for success.

My first few weeks

The early few days can be hectic. In addition to the usual on-boarding you might have, you will probably be bombarded with information about your new team’s tech stack, Technologies and the product itself. This is the time to take advantage of the fact that you do not have any tasks yet. At Plastiq I had my first exposure to Docker as a development environment which meant I was going to change the way I develop code locally. Breath and realize that you do not have to take in all the information provided. One tip I have learned is to learn as much as possible about the development environment before you get started. Most hiring managers will be more than happy to share details like IDE’s used, Languages and frameworks. One trap that a lot of engineers can fall into to is to try and learn everything about the product and technologies. In the first few weeks, it is essential to understand just enough to have context when you are trying to ramp up. This will help you prepare for what is usually the biggest challenge. The dreaded Development environment setup.

Setting up your environment

Nothing will give you more value than trying to set up your development environment. Not only will you get to check out the code that you will be working on but setting up things will also give you insight into the technologies you might be working on in the future. My first few days at Plastiq had me working on a lot of technologies that I had not worked on, Docker, PHP Doctrine ORM among other things. Taking it one step at a time and learning as I go helped me ramp up. Plastiq like a lot of companies also has excellent documentation which also helped me. Getting my development environment set up took a better part of my first week. It was a little bit of an uphill struggle, but by the end of that week, I was ready to build stuff and contribute.

Getting started and being productive

Once I had the development environment set up, I was ready to rock and roll. The advantage of working at a startup is that there is always a lot of work to do. Its good to start small and working on bugs is one of the best ways to get started. Working on bugs involves several steps that help you. Trying to understand the issue gives you insights into the product and reproducing the bug gets you familiar with the various environments you might be working with, and finally debugging the problem and submitting fixes gets you familiar with the process of actually introducing changes that go into production. The fact that we have industry standard tools (Jira and confluence) makes the task a bit easier if you are used to those tools.

Getting Help

The one thing that helped me immensely was asking for help. Plastiq has a great culture of helping folks. People are always motivated to help I any way they can. This was especially true for me since this was my first exposure to a payment platform. While I was comfortable with the technical aspects of the job getting familiar with the business side was something new for me. As always the excellent documentation we maintain at Plastiq helped me. Working on production bugs and running through the product/using it myself also helped me.

Summary

I could not have asked for a better place to start than Plastiq; we have a great team and lots of opportunities to learn new things. We are also expanding! Check out our careers page and see if there is a position you like and feel free to reach out to Viktoria, our recruiter.