Best way to spend time learning before joining a new job

Question

I have 4 weeks before I begin as an entry level engineer in a popular big tech company in their cloud offering division. I wanted to get at least 3 actionable steps on how to set myself up for success in my new role both in tech and in relationships.

Please also discuss any common anti patterns I need to be aware of.

I'll be using a new technology (cloud) and my first step was to buy relevant books. But I realized that it's inefficient and took up an online course to build a small project. Just want to hear how you would approach your month before the job.

Rahul Pandey · Accepted Answer

If you're working in cloud services, e.g. GCP, AWS, Azure, there are a huge number of moving pieces and services.

This could be a rare instance where simply reading about these services and having a basic familiarity is valuable. It's hard or impossible to build something that involves all the 100s of services. However, as you read about them, you should not try to just regurgitate what the service is used for. Try to answer these questions:

What are the new features or changes coming to this service?
What is the developer sentiment of this service?
How important is this service to the company overall?

This will make you much more valuable than simply parroting the technical definition of Amazon Athena, Inspector, Beanstalk, etc. (I wonder how they come up with these names...)

Do you know which team you'll be on? It's probably worth building something or writing code with the product/service you'll be working in.

Best way to spend time learning before joining a new job

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