How we reduced new engineer onboarding time from 2 days to 10 minutes

1. The Problem

Start with a relatable story:

"It works on my machine." We've all heard it.
You hire a brilliant new engineer. They spend their first 3 days just wrestling with npm install errors, missing environment variables, and version mismatches.

We looked at cloud solutions like GitHub Codespaces or Gitpod. They are great, BUT:

• Cost: They get expensive quickly for large teams.
• Privacy: For some of us (especially in fintech/healthcare), sending our entire codebase and data to a third-party cloud is a non-starter.
• Latency: Typing over a network connection never feels quite right.

2. The Quest for a Solution

Briefly mention what you tried (and why it failed):

1. We tried writing massive README.md files. (Nobody reads them).
2. We tried Docker Compose. (Better, but syncing huge data volumes was still a pain).
3. We tried extensive shell scripts. (Maintenance nightmare).

3. Introducing Velovol

So, we built Velovol.

Think of it as a "Self-Hosted Codespaces" that runs on your own infrastructure.

It solves the three biggest headaches:

1. Speed: It packages the entire environment state (not just code).
2. Security: Data never leaves your premise. It syncs from your internal storage directly to the developer's machine.
3. Versioning: Broke the environment? Rollback to the previous snapshot in seconds.

4. How it works (Under the Hood)

Velovol uses a client-server architecture.

• Server: Manages environment snapshots and access control (Role-Based).
• Storage: Connects to your existing internal storage (ZFS).
• Client: Pulls the environment state and mounts it locally, so you get native performance.

5. Demo

Seeing is believing. Here is how fast you can spin up a fresh environment:

https://youtu.be/5vW6iN-7m6M?si=bGLZAg5iFF66cOf6

6. Try it out

We are currently in public beta/launch. If you are a team lead tired of onboarding hell, or a DevOps engineer who needs data sovereignty:

👉 Check out Velovol: https://www.velovol.com/

I'd love to hear your feedback in the comments below! What's your current onboarding struggle?