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Walk through the pre-work onboarding checklist end to end and record what breaks

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#171 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
aws, github, markdown, terraform

Research direction

Start with .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/pre-work-template-devops-security.md and follow it literally from a fresh pre-work issue, comparing links and meeting details with CONTRIBUTING.md, the wiki, and issue #163. Record each new defect with its step and expected result; make only obvious template fixes, link larger decisions to separate issues, and re-run the checklist after the PR merges.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

complexity: medium Feature: Onboarding/Contributing.md role: DevOps Engineer size: 3pt
Overview

We need to confirm that the pre-work checklist a new member opens for themselves actually
works when followed literally, because nobody has run it start to finish since it was
written and we already know at least two of its links are wrong. A checklist that fails on
someone's first day is worse than no checklist, because it also teaches them that our
documentation cannot be trusted.

Action Items
  • Open a real pre-work issue from the template and follow it top to bottom, in order, as
    though you had never seen the repo. Do not skip a step because you already know the
    answer — the point is to find where a newcomer stops.
  • Record every failure as you hit it: dead links, wrong anchors, steps that assume access
    you were never granted, steps that are out of order, commands that error, and anything
    that needs knowledge the checklist never gave you.
  • Pay particular attention to the AWS steps. The checklist has the member create a personal
    AWS account, an IAM user and group, an S3 bucket and a DynamoDB table, then run
    terraform apply. Confirm this still reflects what we want a new member to do and that
    the cost warnings are accurate.
  • Confirm the meeting time in the checklist ("Wednesdays 6-8pm PST", no meetings on the 1st
    Wednesday) matches what the wiki says and what actually happens. These three sources
    currently disagree — see the sibling issue on the wiki meeting text.
  • Post your findings as a comment on this issue, one line per defect, each with the line it
    occurred on and what you expected instead.
  • For anything that is a quick, obvious correction, fix it in a PR against
    .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/pre-work-template-devops-security.md.
  • For anything larger or that needs a decision, open a separate issue and link it here
    rather than expanding this one.
  • After the PR merges, open one more fresh pre-work issue from the template and confirm the
    corrected links resolve. Template changes only render from the default branch, so this
    genuinely cannot be checked from your branch.
Resources/Instructions
  • Template under test: pre-work-template-devops-security.md
  • Target of most of its links: CONTRIBUTING.md
  • Two broken links are already known and ticketed as #163 — do not re-report or re-fix
    those two. This issue is the wider sweep for everything #163 does not cover.
  • Close the pre-work issue you opened for this walkthrough when you are done, so it is not
    mistaken for a real member's onboarding.
Dominant language
HCL
Stars
1
Forks
14
Avg merge
1h 3m
Merged PRs (30d)
21

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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