Taking a week off! 🏖️
A new PTO policy, PPP discount, articles, tools, and more!
Hey everyone!
This is a special issue of Refactoring because, after writing 84 articles without ever skipping a week, I took a week off to spend some time with family & friends.
I am not going to lie, as a solo founder, it felt scary at first. Instead, this time has been fantastic and I feel now more grateful and energised than ever.
It’s easy to get trapped in the hustle mindset and not taking care enough of yourself and your loved ones. You may or may not need to hear this — I certainly needed.
I will use this edition to give you some updates on Refactoring itself and share some great content and tools I have discovered recently.
Let’s dive in! 👇
🏖️ A PTO policy for myself
Following up to what I wrote above, I realized that to keep this newsletter sustainable (and the content top-notch), I need a week or two off here and there.
For this reason, I am inventing a PTO policy for myself.
Paid subscribers will still receive 52+ articles a year, but there will be up to four weeks throughout the year in which you won’t receive an email from me. This means some weeks you’ll get two posts instead of one.
I suspect many of you won’t even notice, but I just wanted to be upfront about this. If this is an issue for you, please let me know!
📰 Refactoring News
Here is what has been happening recently in the Refactoring world.
📈 Growing strong
There are now 464 paid subscribers! 🎉
Yes, this is not a round number — it is neither 400 nor 500. But it still feels incredible since we launched the plan just five months ago.
Other than the articles, here is what I have been working on the most, recently:
🏛️ The New Refactoring Library
Redesigned from scratch based on members ideas and feedback. I add new content every week and people are loving it.
The content library is wonderful. I’m finding something new to read every evening. Luca has done an excellent job curating content. — Jerry, Senior Tech Lead.
💬 Refactoring Community
The community is growing larger by the day, and I am incredibly excited to announce that Jasvir Dhillon has joined the team as our new Head of Community 🎉
Jasvir is an engineer and a former founder, is very thoughtful, and has been in the community since day one. He is the best person I can think of to help make this space 10x better!
The community is still small, but very engaged! More than 70% of our members are active monthly; we have weekly live events, and we host brilliant conversations in threads every day.
You can learn more and apply to join here.
🎁 PPP Discount
I created a new, heavily discounted plan designed to help people in developing countries. If you want to learn more or apply for it, just reach out by replying to this email!
Also, if you are reading this from Ukraine 🇺🇦 you can reach out to get a free Refactoring membership.
📚 Resources
Here are some great readings, videos and tools I found recently.
📺 Improving Engineering Productivity
I recently joined a panel within the INTERACT conference to discuss engineering productivity with two other awesome guests. You can find the full video below.
It was a great conversation, and I also plan to create a full write-up for this in the coming weeks.
📑 Code Reviews 101
This handbook is probably the best piece I have ever read on how to have good code reviews.
It covers so many angles that are rarely discussed, like the mentorship value of reviews, the relationship with the rest of the company, and more.
It has been written by Matt Van Itallie, CEO at Sema, and long-time member of the Refactoring community.
📑 BBC Online – A year with serverless
This is one of a four-part series of articles about how and why the BBC moved its entire stack to serverless. I am a big proponent of the serverless stack, but it’s hard to find large case studies on it. This series is fantastic and it highlights some impressive numbers.
🔨 Tools
Clutch — Clutch is like Glassdoor for product dev agencies. It helps you find the right agency by filtering by ratings, budget, and more. I discovered it just recently (thanks Flavio 🙏).
ProjectionLab — I manage my personal finances on huge Excel files with tons of complex calculations and scenarios. ProjectionLab is the first tool that has a shot at finally replacing them. I have been using it for a week and I love it so far.
That’s it! See you next week!