Finally got a job, what can I do to make my onboarding experience better?

After being laid off 8 months ago, I’m in a new role! 6-month contract that started earlier this November. The first two months revolve around holidays, so stuff might be slow, but things will pick up after. I want to do everything I can during the first trimester of my contract to earn fulltime with the company. This is a junior position. My manager is a kind person who says nice things about my ability to communicate, learn, and write documentation.

I reviewed the complete onboarding guide on Taro. Since I was a tad bit tired from my job search entering the company, didn’t have much direction with my first task provided in my first week, and my manager was the only person giving me communication, my initiative in my first week and a half of onboarding was lax. But now, I have sense of urgency to do more! 

I was learning company cultural norms, meeting people, etc. There was lots of stuff different from my previous employer. I also noticed there wasn’t a clear onboarding strategy. I was just given code to read through, and went over it with my manager. I’d ping my manager in the morning and in the afternoon with status updates summarizing what I’ve learned and used the formula from the guide to ask great questions. Due to my initial confusion, I decided to make an onboarding guide myself for future engineers! Eventually, I was given a senior engineer to shadow, who I also reach out to during the morning and afternoon just like my manager. I’m also building relationships with my teammates, slowly but surely finding out what teammates are in the give knowledge buckets vs the get knowledge buckets. 

I’m always vigilant to add impact. Just today, I noticed that anyone had edit access to some really important documents other than read, so I reached out to the person in charge of the documents saying “hi, I found anyone can accidentally edit these. To prevent a future mistake, I found this link that shares an idea of how to stop this.” 

Every week I make 3 goals for myself to improve on, such as “understand this code base”, “improve skills in SQL”, “make my first meaningful code contribution”, etc., and record my progress on these set goals throughout the week. My manager would have a meeting with my contract team monthly to discuss how things are going. 

My manager told me I’m still just in the onboarding phase, so I should just follow the formula, and everything will fall into place. Given all this, what else should I do?