Monthly Digest — January 📌

1000 subscribers, a new landing page, and four new articles!

Hi everyone and welcome to our monthly digest.

Once a month I publish a special issue to recap things I have written in the past 30 days.

I also use it to share updates about Refactoring, and since things move pretty fast here, there is never shortage of news!

So let's start with the 💥

💥 1000 Subscribers!

Four months in, we hit 1000 subscribers! It's a fantastic milestone and I thank you all for trusting me with your attention 🙏

I genuinely love writing about these topics — I would do it even if it was for myself only. But it's even more thrilling to be able to share all of this with an audience, and chat with those of you who write questions, comments and feedback on the articles.

Writing regularly makes me grow personally and professionally. Publishing what I write makes me meet new, interesting people every week. When you combine the two things, it really feels like cheating.

🖥️ Landing Page

To celebrate this milestone, I am launching a brand new, dedicated landing page for Refactoring.

The goal is being able to communicate better the mission and value provided by the newsletter. I have put a more thorough description, topics examples, and testimonials from a few friends.

It’s still in stealth mode right now — you can find it at http://refactoring.club/

I would love to hear your feedback, so let me know what you think about it!

📚 Articles

And here is the actual digest for this month. We have discussed four topics — primarily about people and working together.

✍️ How I Write Refactoring

We started the new year with a deep dive on my writing process. I do exactly the same things every week, and for the first time I wrote down and shared them in public.

I am really happy this article got a great response, with many people reaching out for more advice, and a few who got inspired to start writing too!

🏔️ The Pyramid of Engagement

I have always been fascinated by the psychology behind motivation and productivity.

By surveying more than 30 million people in over 80 years, Gallup defined a model to improve engagement in any team, based on 12 elements across 4 categories.

These form a hierarchy, akin to the Maslow's pyramid of needs.

In the article I try to discuss them, also providing a small framework on how we can support them as leaders.

🎽 Feature Teams vs Durable Teams

When we think of team organization we often think of hierarchies, matrices and functions. One important angle that rarely gets discussed is time.

How long is the life of a team? How long are people going to work together?

I had the chance of working in both situations, so I analyzed them to help people understand what's best for their company.

🎒 The Three Levels of Onboarding

Onboarding is one of those overlooked processes that often are expected to just happen.

I believe, instead, that good onboarding is an incredible opportunity for companies to 1) make their hiring cycle shorter and 2) make people happier and engaged from the start.

In the article I address these points, drawing from the experience of a few leaders I admire, and trying to mix it with my own.

And that's it for January! See you next week 👋 and if you have any question or feedback, feel free to reply to the email, or let me know in the comments!

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Hey, I am Luca 👋 thank you for reading this through!

Every week I read tens of articles and draw from my own experience to create a 10-minutes advice about some engineering leadership topic.

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