New Tools and Techniques for 2024 📡

A tech radar of stuff you should include in your new year resolutions!

Welcome to the first Refactoring edition of 2024! 🥳

For many teams, this time of the year is a time of reflection and planning, so I want to help by covering new, interesting stuff that you may use in 2024.

This edition is a list of recommended items, each with my own commentary about why you should consider it. Items are organized into three categories:

1. 🔄 Techniques — engineering or management practices for your team. These are about working well together, and are agnostic from your tech stack.

2. 🛠️ Tools — ready-made stuff that you can use to achieve a specific goal. I try to cover widespread use cases to maximize the chances that you benefit from the listed items.

3. 🧱 Platforms & Frameworks — tech you use to build things upon. These are core pieces of your stack and may be coupled to your core language / infra choices.

I create this list once a year, and it is heavily inspired by the Thoughtworks’ Technology Radar framework. The Refactoring list has four main sources:

1. 🙋‍♂️ Myself — I go through my own list of tools that I have used this year, on my Notion.

2. 🍻 Friends — I reach out to the smartest tech leaders I know about the best things they started using/doing.

3. 💬 Community — I survey people in the Refactoring community.

4. 🔍 Thoughtworks — I go through the past year's editions of the Thoughtworks’ Radar to snipe interesting items.

Items should meet a fine balance between being 1) consolidated enough that I can safely recommend them, and 2) novel enough that chances are you are not using them yet.

Basically, we are picking things somewhere in between the early adopters and early majority stages 👇

Finally, it goes without saying, none of these tools paid me to be included here. I just used them personally and I am happy to recommend them.

Let’s dive in!