Monthly Digest — November 📌

Refactoring Library, questions, what I read this month, and 3 new articles.

Nov 25, 2021

Hi there! November is almost over and it's time for our monthly digest!

For all new folks who joined recently, this is a special issue I write at the end of each month. I use it to give updates about Refactoring itself, recap the latest articles, and share some great resources.

We have so many topics today, so let's start! 👇

🌀 Refactoring Club

This has been the most important month ever for Refactoring, because, in case you missed it:

I left my job to work full-time on it.
I launched the premium version of the newsletter — or the club, as I call it.

The launch has been amazing and 150+ of you have already subscribed to it. I am really grateful — the goal is to turn this into the best investment you ever made for your engineering career.

But news have just started! 👇

🗳️ Refactoring Questions

You can now suggest topics I should write about. I have created a small form where you can leave questions, feedback and anything you would like to tell me.

You find it here, and I will also include it at the beginning of every email.

Of course, you can still just reply to these emails and I will write back to you.

🏛️ Refactoring Library

Premium subscribers have now access to a brand new library, that allows to:

✍️ Browse all the articles I have ever written (60+)
📚 Browse all the readings I have ever recommended (150+)
🔨 Browse all the tools I have ever recommended (50+)

Now you can say: let me check what Luca wrote or suggested about hiring — and it's there! In two clicks.

Browse readings and filter them by tag or keywords

You can filter everything by tags, topics, keywords, and it’s super fast.

Also, the website is a PWA so you can add it to the home screen of your phone and it doubles as a beautiful app.

I can’t overstate how happy I am about this: I have spent more than one year reading tens of articles every week and religiously saving and organizing the very best ones. For the first time, I can make this material available to you, in an easy and beautiful way.

I also created a small introductory video where I go through the sections and explain how things work 👇

This is just the beginning, but I already can’t think of any other space on the internet that covers so many engineering topics with high-quality curated content, tools and original essays.

This is exclusive to premium members of Refactoring. If you like it and want to have access, consider subscribing! 🚀

📚 What I am reading

Here is a selection of the best things I read / watched / listened this month.

🎙️ Management and the Future of AI — with Azure's CTO Darren Dillon

I am happy to promote the Dev Interrupted podcast as it is one of the very few where you regularly get engineering leaders speaking about their challenges and career.

This is a great episode where Darren goes through so much stuff — how to run a globally distributed team, build culture, manage colleagues who are also friends, set people up for success, and have cocktail parties on Zoom (this last one is a gem).

📑 Meta — by Ben Thompson

There have been all kinds of commentary around the Facebook / Meta shift. Ben really nails it in my opinion, focusing on how this is a typical "founder's move" and how Meta is now the only one of the Big 5 tech companies that is still founder-led.

📹 Blame — by Brené Brown

This fantastic animated short explains how blame works, how it is corrosive for relationships, and how we can overcome it. If you like it, I encourage to look for other Brené videos on YouTube, she is really great.

🌀 Articles

Finally, here are the three articles I have written this month 👇

Coding in the Browser ☁️

In August, Github announced they migrated the whole engineering team to Codespaces, their cloud development environment.

That is, Github engineers now write code fully in the browser. Should you too? 🤔

In this article I researched how people can write software on the cloud today, and why they should or should not. We talk of:

🐄 Cattle vs pets
⚖️ Upsides and downsides of cloud development
🤹‍♂️ The best tools available today

Company Docs 📖

For decades, companies have created documents that fell under a few, rigid categories: spreadsheets, text, presentations. They have done so with Microsoft Office and they do the same, more recently, with Google Docs.

In recent times, new tools rose to challenge this approach.

Notion, Coda, and the likes, focus more on the relationships between documents than documents themselves. They help us create a body of knowledge that is dynamic and connected.

This brings benefits both to companies and individuals:

👤 For individuals — it changes how we can learn new things and connect them to our existing knowledge.
🏢 For companies — it changes the way people work together. Information is not siloed anymore, you connect different data to generate insights and improve collaboration.

In this article I wrote about this shift, and how we can leverage it to write great company docs.

The Future of Refactoring 🌱

This is where I announced the next steps for Refactoring, together with my decision to go full-time on it.

I talk about my plans for Refactoring, that include:

👑 Premium Subscription
💬 Private Community
🏛️ Curated Library
🎁 Exclusive Deals

Check it out if you missed it to learn more about Refactoring vision and what's coming next!

⭐ Weekly Featured Jobs

Here are the remote engineering jobs I recommend this week.

I personally review all of them and have a chat with each company to get more context and better understand the opportunity.

The.com 🆕

Software Engineer — $150-220K + 0.1-1.0% Equity

The.com is building the reusable web, making it simple to create, remix, and launch websites. It's and incredible tool that changes how people think about authorship online.

Launch House

Launch House is a community built to connect and support the world’s most ambitious entrepreneurs and creators. It recently raised $3M from top-tier investors such as Balaji.

How would you rate this edition? 🤔

Amazing • Great • Good • OK • Meh