Kakao Reveals 7-Week Technical Onboarding Program for Server Role New Crews

Kakao shared the 7-week technical onboarding program and its results for new server developers (New Crews). A total of 53 New Crews participated in this onboarding, which aimed to strengthen practical skills centered around Java and Spring.

Onboarding Curriculum and Mission Structure

The education covered core topics including TDD (Test-Driven Development), OOP (Object-Oriented Programming), the Spring Framework, and Web Server Implementation. New Crews applied theory to practice by completing a total of six missions, each taking approximately one week.

• Missions 1–2: Learned TDD and object-oriented design principles (SOLID, TDA) by implementing car racing and lottery systems.
• Missions 3–5: Developed an escape room cafe reservation system based on Spring, gaining experience with JdbcTemplate, authentication/authorization handling, resolving concurrency issues, and dependency management.
• Mission 6: Directly implemented an HTTP web server without a framework to understand fundamental principles.

Collaboration Methods and Outcomes

New Crews formed teams of 5–6 members, holding daily meetings and weekly retrospectives. All missions were conducted via pair programming with randomly matched partners, accompanied by detailed code reviews from senior Kakao Crews. Post-onboarding survey results indicated that the majority of New Crews reported a competency growth of 1–3 levels.