Platform-productivity · Nov 10, 2025 · 9 minute read

The Onboarding Program That Cut Time-to-First-PR from 5 Days to 70 Minutes

Your devs don’t need more bespoke tooling. They need a paved road that just works. Here’s the program we roll out when teams are tired of yak-shaving laptops for a week.

Alex Mercer

Principal Consultant, GitPlumbers

20 years building and rescuing platforms at scale. Led SRE and platform teams at a FAANG-adjacent company, shipped boring paved roads at unicorns you’ve definitely used, and retired more bespoke dev CLIs than I care to admit.

> I’ve yet to see a homegrown dev CLI beat a boring `make` + `asdf` + `devcontainer` setup over a 12‑month horizon.
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Key takeaways

  • Design for the 90% path with a paved road; push bespoke needs behind escape hatches.
  • Automate Day 0–2: machine bootstrap, local run, first PR. Everything else can wait.
  • Favor boring, well-supported tools (`asdf`, `devcontainer`, `Tilt`, `docker compose`) over custom CLIs.
  • Measure TTFP50/TTFP90 and break down time sinks with friction logs; optimize the top three issues first.
  • Ship repo templates and pre-commit checks so every new service starts compliant by default.
  • Use ephemeral previews and one-click seeds to remove “works on my machine” from the vocabulary.

Implementation checklist

  • Standardize a `make bootstrap` that sets up toolchains via `asdf` or Homebrew.
  • Provide a `devcontainer.json` or Codespaces config that runs green out of the box.
  • Offer a single `make run` (or `task dev`) that brings up app + deps locally.
  • Seed data with a single command (`make seed`) and publish sample `.env.example`.
  • Ship repo templates with CI, linters, pre-commit, and security by default.
  • Track and publish TTFP50/TTFP90 as a KPI; collect friction logs for the first week.
  • Roll out paved-road docs in Backstage and keep them tested like code.

Questions we hear from teams

We’re a polyglot org (Go, Node, Python, Java). Can one paved road handle that?
Yes. `asdf` handles language versions consistently, `devcontainer` standardizes base images, and `make`/`task` normalize verbs. Your templates can branch by stack specifics, but the dev mental model stays identical.
What about Windows developers?
Use devcontainers/Codespaces to avoid OS divergence. If local Windows is mandatory, standardize on WSL2 and test `make bootstrap` in CI against an Ubuntu image. Keep native-only paths behind feature flags.
Aren’t ephemeral environments expensive?
Not if you cap lifetimes and scope. Use k8s namespaces with quotas and terminate previews on PR close or 24h idle. For many teams, a shared preview env with isolated databases is a pragmatic first step.
Why not keep our custom dev CLI if people like it?
If it’s thin sugar over `make`, fine. If it’s a binary only three people can debug, you’ve created a gatekeeper. Longevity favors simple, replaceable parts. Measure maintenance cost and incident time before committing.

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