Onboarding and plan for the first few months

1. identify and address any critical issues that may exist. These types of issues can be distracting so getting them out of the way quickly allows us to move the technology ahead in more purposeful way. There will always be bugs and minor issues that need to be dealt with but should not dominate the overall development strategy.
2. working through some of the most critical issues will give me a chance to learn the architecture and start building a strategy for moving forward. This could include things like evaluating whether we should break up the existing monolith or leveraging various services from AWS to build systems and processes that are smaller and easier to manage.
3. Get a complete understanding of the development processes being used and the technology in the existing systems paying particular close attention to security and efficiency issues
4. Look for easy wins - ways to simplify complex algorithms/systems, migration of components to simpler or more cost-effective solutions/services, replace in-house code with open source or maybe even commercially available products if possible
5. As we build these new systems, we can also introduce DevOps process to manage these new components include the code review process, how new code and bug fixes are moved into production, introducing observability and logging systems.
6. Data protection. Make sure that data is both secure and backed up.
7. As we get into a more regular work flow, we can start exploring our agile workflow and other development processes. My preference is to use the minimum amount of process to get the work done. Similar to the actual systems we are building, processes do need to be reviewed frequently in order to make sure they are still efficient and effective.