Congratulations on your first tech job and I hope this post helps you get through it smoothly. Though you will learn a lot of things while working on the job, it's always good to be prepared for this new phase in your career.

Let's start with the points.

1. Research about the company

This step is usually done before interviewing for the company as it helps to check if the company's goals, technology preferences or even the industry of the company aligns with your interests. If you haven't done this already, which is completely fine because (a lot of times) getting the job in the first place is really important and you can gel with the company with time.

So for this step, search on the company’s website, glassdoor, or message some employees on LinkedIn. If you are not connected with them on LinkedIn yet, send them a personalized message along with the connection request as this increases the chances of your request getting accepted. Even check out the company's page on LinkedIn and learn about the new events or milestones the company has recently posted on. This is an excellent exercise to check on the company’s social presence. This will help you set your grounds with the company and also connections made for this research can be valuable later.

2. Learn the tech stack.

Find out the technologies used by the company through those sources in step one and start learning the basics of the stack before joining the company. If it's a product-based company (PBC), spend some time on the company’s website and learn about the company's products, its clients, and the market. There is a detailed post on some great youtube channels that you can check to brush off on some programming languages.

3. Prepare basics of GitHub.

Even after graduating as a computer engineer, I still struggled with GitHub even though I had a ton of experience using it. Companies will have millions of lines of legacy code and hefty repositories on GitHub, so it's necessary to be safe while working with them. Start by cloning any open source repository online in your personal repository and try to play around with it. Try to stage, commit changes in different branches through the command prompt, cherry-pick, revert changes and merge the pull request. These are just basic git actions but one of the most frequently used operations.

To avoid long posts, I have divided this post into two parts. Check out part two for more tips.