The Best of Refactoring in 2021 🎄
The most-read issues, a review of what happened this year and a preview of what's to come.
Hello everyone!
I hope you are having a wonderful Christmas break 🎄 surrounded by your loved ones.
In the last few days I spent some time at L’Aquila with my family to recharge and reflect. We visited the beautiful city and surroundings.
We had a great time, and I am back now to wrap up this incredible year!
This is the last post of 2021, so I will use it to:
🔍 Review this year at Refactoring
✍️ List the best articles of 2021
🔮 Tell you more about what’s coming next
📚 Recommend other great readings
Let’s dive in!
🚀 200+ paid members!
In November I left my job, started working full-time on Refactoring, and launched the new, paid version of the newsletter.
We are closing the year with more than 200 paid subscribers, which is fantastic 🎉
Subscribers are growing steadily so far, and the unsubscribe rate is very low. Thank you so much for making this possible 🙏 and for allowing me to do this work.
Since November I also launched the 🏛️ Library, the 💬 Community, and the 🎁 Deals program, with the goal of making Refactoring a no-brainer investment for your career.
This is all paying off — the number of opens of Refactoring emails had an inflection point and is now growing faster than ever.
I believe this is because I can now spend more time on writing articles, which in turn leads to better quality. Articles are longer, with more insights and more research to back them up.
💬 Community
While I greatly enjoy writing articles, the community has quickly become what makes me the most proud of my work.
It is a joy to watch this group of incredible people connect, interact and share insights everyday.
I believe we have the chance to create a space like no others for engineering leaders, and I am going to double down on it.
One of my resolutions for the next year is to make Refactoring more collaborative, and write articles that are the result of the collective wisdom shared in the community. People will tell their experience and the best takes will make it into the newsletter. This already happened in the latest Code Reviews article — but we will do it better and in a more structured way.
If you want to take part in it, consider subscribing if you haven’t already.
✍️ The best articles of 2021
Here are the best articles I wrote this year, based on number of opens, shares, and likes.
🔮 Some of what’s coming in 2022
And here are other articles I am going to write next year and I am excited about 👇
What engineering looks like in Web3
How to balance new features vs repaying tech debt
How to create good engineering OKRs
How to run effective retrospectives
My personal tools stack
How to develop strong relationships in a remote team
📚 Resources
Finally, two great pieces I read in the past weeks that I am sure you will enjoy. They are not about engineering, but hey, it’s holiday season!
📑 Levels: A Cultural Anomaly — this article by Mario Gabriele was interesting to me for multiple reasons: 1) it introduced me to the concept of metabolic health, and since then I have spent an unhealthy amount of time further researching it, 2) I loved the “extreme” async culture angle, and 3) personal productivity tips from Levels CEO were fantastic.
📑 Friendly Ambitious Nerd — by Visa. I have followed Visa for a long time on Twitter. He is one of the most prolific and interesting authors I know. This short ebook is a collection of essays about a wide range of topics: creativity, relationships, communities, introspection, and more. It is one of the best things I read the whole year, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
That’s it for this week! See you next year! ✨