1. Onboarding Contributors
Autonomy is our goal, but it is an earned privilege. We want new hires to operate independently as quickly as possible, but they must first prove they understand our guardrails.
"Flying solo" means you have demonstrated that you can follow the process without someone watching over your shoulder.
The Process
System Integration
New engineers are invited to the company's GitHub and all internal tools.
Why: All invites must be accepted within 24 hours to demonstrate responsiveness.
Environment & Context
Clone the product repository and feed the existing AI Product Specs into your AI coding assistant.
Why: This ensures you and your AI immediately understand our specific architecture rather than guessing from a blank context.
Tool Mastery
Review and thoroughly understand our logging tools and stability monitoring dashboards before touching any code.
The Verification Task
Complete a low-risk bug fix. Write the code, write comprehensive tests covering the fix, and push it through the automated CI/CD pipeline.
Review & Merge
Once automated checks pass, the code goes to manual peer review. Upon approval it is merged into production.
Earn Your "Flying Solo" Badge
Upon successful merge the engineer earns their Flying Solo Badge.
Why: This badge signals to management that the engineer understands the SOP end-to-end and can be assigned standard tasks without supervision.
Example
Sarah joins the team. She clones the Maildrip repository and feeds the maildrip-specs.md file to her AI assistant. She is assigned a minor bug where the PAYG billing calculation is displaying the wrong currency symbol. She fixes it, writes a unit test, and pushes it. The CI/CD pipeline passes. A lead reviews the code, approves it, and Sarah receives her Flying Solo badge.