Refactoring Summer Update! 🏖️

40,000 subscribers, awesome community activities, and a new plan for teams

Hey everyone! Welcome to this special summer edition that gives you an update on everything that has happened at Refactoring in the past three months.

I write these editions about once a quarter, so this is the one for Q2!

Let’s start with numbers 👇

📈 40,000 Subscribers

Refactoring now has more than 40,000 subscribers, out of which 1200+ are paid!

This is an incredible milestone, and as you can see we are growing faster than ever.

What makes me even prouder, is that most of this growth comes from other people recommending Refactoring. In two ways:

• ✏️ Writers — more than 130 Substack publications now recommend Refactoring. This is insane!

• 👓 Readers — with the new referral program, people can bring in friends and get a free subscription in return. This has already brought in hundreds of new readers.

So, thank you all for supporting this journey and trusting me with your time and attention! Refactoring is made by you: by your comments, your ideas, your questions that every week drive me to write new articles.

I will never take all of this for granted 🙏

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💬 Community activities

I have been running the community for about 1.5 years now. It is the most rewarding part of Refactoring, and I feel like it’s never been in a better shape.

It takes time to understand what makes each community special. At Refactoring, what matters it’s the mutual support + the things we do together.

People share their challenges every day and receive awesome help from 500+ experienced tech leaders.

Also, we focus more and more on doing great things together. Here is what we are up to:

• 📗 Book Club — this is new! Every two months we read some famous book in the engineering/management space, and we review it together in a live event at the end of the period. We are currently reading Good Strategy / Bad Strategy.

• 🥁 Show & Tell — every two weeks we celebrate small wins and things we are grateful for. People also share what they build (or write!) to get early adopters and genuine feedback.

• 🎟️ Events + Recordings — about twice a month we host an incredible guest for a live interview where people can join for Q&A. Some of the latest guests include James Cowling, Jean Hsu, and Thiago Ghisi.

• ➡️ Coming up — this is a staple of the community! I create a thread about the next topic I want to write an article about, roughly two weeks before publishing. People join the conversation with their own experience and insights, and the best ideas end up in the newsletter, quoting the author.

Community access is exclusive to paid subscribers. If you like what you see and you are on a free plan, consider getting the full experience!

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🎽 Refactoring for Teams

Finally, this is something I have been working on for a looong time and I am extremely excited about.

I am obsessed with professional development. Refactoring is 100% about this, and for more than a year I have been talking with teams to figure out how I can help their engineers grow, both individually and as a team.

I even wrote about this in a recent edition 👇

How to Invest in Engineers' Growth 🎓

I believe I have finally cracked it, so I am about to launch an official Refactoring for Teams plan, which is about four things:

1. 🧵 Weekly Essays — 15-minutes primers on relevant engineering / management topics. This is perfect for serendipitous learning about useful stuff.

2. 🏛️ Learning Tracks — when you want to learn about a specific topic, you can look to the Library and find articles, tools and resources carefully organized by me. There are 150+ articles I have written myself, plus 250+ external resources to complement them.

3. 💬 Community Support — the community acts as distributed coaching, where people ask questions and get tons of answers from 500+ experienced tech leaders.

4. 🪴 1:1 Coaching — for the highest level of support, over time I have built a vetted network of professional coaches, fractional CTOs, and tech advisors, that you can contact directly to get bespoke help. You will also find them in the community, happy to join public threads.

   

This is still in stealth mode and right now I am running pilots with ~10 companies.

If you are interested in joining with your team, reach out below and I can tell you more / we can jump in a call 👇

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And that’s it for today! See you next week ☀️

Sincerely,
Luca