IDS — History
Winter 2024 Learning
Notes and reflections from the onboarding period in Winter 2024 — tools, processes, and first impressions.
OnboardingLearningFoundations
Context
Winter 2024 marked the beginning of the journey with IDS as a Software Engineer. This entry captures the onboarding experience, initial learning goals, and key takeaways from the first weeks.
Onboarding Highlights
- Completed product introduction sessions covering the CMF product's purpose, target users (surgeons, design engineers), and general workflow.
- Set up the full development environment: Visual Studio, Rhino SDK, DevOps pipelines, and access to version-controlled repositories.
- Attended walkthroughs of the codebase architecture to understand how modules, services, and UI components are structured.
Key Learnings
Technical
- First exposure to RhinoCommon and headless Rhino processing — conceptually different from standard app development.
- Understood the relationship between 3D geometry data and the downstream surgical planning workflows it supports.
- Practiced navigating a large, mature C# codebase for the first time, focusing on reading before writing.
Process
- Learned the team's Agile rhythm: standups, sprint planning, refinement, review, and retro.
- Understood how tasks move from Product Owner backlog → sprint items → dev → test → release.
- Gained clarity on how pull requests are structured and reviewed within the team.
People
- Identified key contacts across SE, TE, DE, PM, and PO roles.
- Understood informal norms: where to ask questions, how to escalate blockers, and how to communicate status.
Reflections
The initial weeks were dense but grounding. The gap between academic knowledge and production software became very clear — learning to read before writing was the most valuable discipline to adopt early on.