Introducing Guest Authors ✏️

A brand new program + four amazing writers who are joining Refactoring in Q1

Jan 01, 2025

Hi everyone, and happy new year! ✨

This is our first Refactoring edition of 2025, and we are using it to make more announcements!

Over the past couple of weeks we have introduced coaches-in-residence and our new branding, including a new wordmark and a new font, both hand-drawn by yours truly!

Today, we are introducing guest authors: a new program that allows extraordinary writers to contribute to Refactoring 👇

🙋‍♂️ Guest authors at Refactoring

When I started Refactoring I had two main sources of inspiration:

💼 Business inspiration — “OG” newsletter writers like Lenny, who had started their Substacks even before I did, and had made it, that is, they had turned writing into a full-time profession.
✏️ Writing inspiration — the extraordinary engineering writers who had influenced me the most during my career, through books, articles, and papers.

Thanks to Refactoring, over time I was able to connect with many of the latter, interview them on the podcast, exchange ideas, and just stay in touch as humans.

As a result, when I started working on the guest author program, I reached out to some of those writers and just asked them if they wanted to join.

Our for initial guest authors, portrayed by the awesome Grace Helmer

They all gladly accepted (!!) so here is the incredible panel of authors which we’ll work together in Q1:

🟢 Dana Lawson — CTO at Netlify
🔴 Charity Majors — CTO at Honeycomb
🔵 Thiago Ghisi — Director of Eng at Nubank
🟡 Camille Fournier — Author & ex VP of Tech at JPMorgan

You may recognize their names, because 1) they are among the most accomplished tech leaders in the world, and 2) I quoted them several times in the newsletter — from Charity’s hot takes on the development process, to Camille’s evergreen lessons from The Manager’s Path.

So, how does this work?

📌 How does it work?

Guest articles are a collaboration between myself and an external author, and we do about one of these per month.

Each guest author brings their own ideas and expertise, while I work as an editor to make the piece a Refactoring one. What does this mean?

If you have been reading Refactoring for a while, you know articles have a distinct style. They follow a precise structure (e.g. the agenda at the beginning), have their own formatting (e.g. emojis in headings) and tone of voice.

It’s a thousand small things that make Refactoring… Refactoring, and I think of myself as the guardian of these.

So, the goal of the program is to bring in authoritative voices who are able to cover themes that I wouldn’t be able to cover by myself, while still producing the type of article you have come to expect from Refactoring.

The program is in a kind of private beta, as for now I am personally reaching out to authors I would love to have onboard. But if you have a great idea for an article and would like to contribute, feel free to reach out by replying to this email with an abstract + some sample of past writing you have done. Authors get paid + they receive a portrait from the awesome Grace Helmer, like the ones above.

🎙️ Bonus: the new podcast season!

You may have noticed that all our guest authors have been podcast guests in the past.

This is not accidental.

In fact, in a way, this program feels like a natural continuation of the podcast: it brings in more voices, not just in 1:1 conversations, but in the flagship format of our newsletter, that is: weekly articles.

The podcast has become a cornerstone of everything we do, and we are launching our Q1 2025 season with 5 extraordinary guests:

Martin Fowler — Chief Scientist of Thoughtworks
Marco Trombetti — co-founder & CEO of Translated
Ori Keren — co-founder & CEO of LinearB
Dan Shipper — co-founder & CEO of Every
Adam Wiggins — GM of The Browser Company; co-founder of Heroku

We will start publishing the interviews from next week, at a pace of one every two weeks.

🏆 The Year of Quality

I want to close this newsletter with a small reflection.

You may have noticed that the first podcast seasons had 10 guests each, and we published an interview every week, which is exactly double what we are doing now.

This is not accidental — we are slowing things down, to focus on quality.

There is an explosion of content online, an awful lot of newsletters, and an awful lot of podcasts. Up until a couple of years ago, when a creator reached out for advice, I usually stressed about consistency: publish every week, be prolific, stay in the game for years.

Today, I don’t think that’s true anymore.

Today you can only succeed by creating extraordinary content that is undeniably worth your readers’ time. So this is my personal commitment for 2025: I will only publish things I am incredibly proud of.

To do this, we are raising the bar on everything we do: we are pairing with incredible authors on our pieces, with professional coaches in our community, and illustrators to display our ideas.

Let’s make 2025 the best year ever for Refactoring, and let’s do it together.