The First Day PR

Seven years ago, I made my first PR (or, more accurately, a Diff at the time) at Moloco. It was about a week after I joined, and the task involved writing some Javascript code to parse and format CSV data in the browser. I felt a sense of accomplishment—it was my first product code in five years after stepping away from coding entirely. Most of that week was spent getting familiar with the platform and tech stack (we used Angular then), and I thought I had done a decent job. But, recently, I stumbled upon an article titled "Software Engineers Should Be Able To Push Code To Production On Their First Day." I couldn’t help but agree with the one line.

The only barriers to a new engineer releasing that quickly are familiarity and trust.

Familiarity and trust. Familiarity might be something the team needs to provide. A well-organized team or tech company should have a streamlined onboarding process (and a remarkable knowledge base) that helps newcomers quickly adapt to the environment. Trust, on the other hand, is more challenging. While a team can create a great system to allow new hires to contribute safely, it's easier to say than done; building trust is much harder. It’s often something the newcomer needs to earn. Even senior engineers may come with good reputations, but the credit can fade quickly. Submitting a PR and seeing it merged into production is the most effective way to gain the trust of colleagues, no matter your experience level.