Video to Markdown API

# New hire onboarding — engineering

**Kind:** video
**Created:** 2026-07-24T14:30:00.000Z
**MIME Type:** video/mp4
**Size:** 184549376 bytes
**Chunks:** 48

## Media

**Duration:** 1426.8s
**Width:** 1920
**Height:** 1080
**Transcript:**
Welcome to the engineering onboarding series. This video covers your local development setup, how we handle deployments, and where to find documentation for each service.

Let's start with your dev environment. You'll need Node 20 or later and Docker Desktop. Clone the monorepo from GitHub and run the bootstrap script. It pulls all service dependencies and spins up the local stack.

The bootstrap takes about three minutes the first time. Once it's done you should see all six services running in Docker. Hit localhost 3000 to confirm the dashboard loads.

For deployments, we use GitHub Actions. Every merge to main triggers a build, runs the test suite, and deploys to staging automatically. Production deploys require a manual approval step in the Actions UI.

Let me walk you through the repo structure. The monorepo is organised by service. Each service has its own directory with a Dockerfile, a local docker-compose override, and a README that covers the service's API surface. Start with the gateway service, that's the entry point for all client requests.

The gateway handles authentication, rate limiting, and request routing. It forwards requests to the appropriate downstream service based on the URL path. If you need to add a new route, the gateway README has a step-by-step guide.

For testing, we use Vitest for unit tests and Playwright for end-to-end. Every PR runs the full test suite before it can be merged. If your tests touch the database, use the test fixtures in the shared package rather than seeding data manually.

Documentation lives in two places. Service-level docs are in each service's README. Architecture decisions, team processes, and onboarding guides are in the Notion wiki. Your manager should have shared access to both during your first week.

One thing to keep in mind: we rotate on-call weekly. You won't be on the rotation for your first month, but after that you'll take a week every six to eight weeks. The runbook for common incidents is in the wiki under Operations.

That covers the basics. If you get stuck, the engineering Slack channel is the fastest way to get help. Don't hesitate to ask questions. Everyone went through this same setup.