The Best of Refactoring in 2024! 🎄
A review of this year + what to expect from the next!
Hey there, Merry Christmas! 🎄
It’s the end of the year and, as always at Refactoring, it’s time for two things:
🔍 Review — of what we did this year
🎁 Announcements — about what comes next!
Reviewing publicly what I do has many benefits: it forces me to be more rigorous in the analysis, it connects me with readers who may be interested in specific aspects of my work, and (I hope) it inspires others to do the same, in the spirit of building in public.
Announcements are equally important: they create momentum ⚡ and (hopefully) make people excited about the new things we are going to do. For me and the team these are also moments of celebration after long stretches of hard work.
And boy are we packed today! Here is what we will cover:
📈 Subscriber growth — our best year ever.
🌀 What is Refactoring now? — how we improved and matured the way we support your professional growth.
💬 The Year of Community — putting community at the center of Refactoring through Masterminds and coaching.
🎙️ The Year of the Podcast — the best experiment we did in 2024, which is only getting better.
🎨 A New Logo! — an updated brand identity for the new year.
🚀 What Comes Next — a sneak peek at what we are doing in 2025
🌟 The Best Articles of the Year — my favorite 10 pieces from 2024.
Let’s go!
📈 Subscribers growth
In 2024 Refactoring went from 50K to 100K+ subscribers, which is more than 2x!
Every year so far we have doubled our readers: from 10K to 25K in 2022, from 25K to 50K in 2023, and from 50K to 100K this year.
And we are still growing strong, adding ~1500 subscribers / week. As of today, the vast majority of these come from Substack recommendations — that is, other writers recommending Refactoring! We don’t do ads anymore, and invest very little in SEO (we should probably do more).
Why did we grow so much? I like to think that’s because we spent a lot of time thinking about what Refactoring really is, and how to help engineers and managers with their professional growth. The result is a richer & more focused proposition 👇
🌀 What is Refactoring, really?
Refactoring is about helping people write great software and work well together. This looks very broad — so how do we do it in practice? Through four pillars:
📬 Content — it all starts with great weekly content. We do this both in written form (essays) and video/audio (voiceovers, podcasts) to make sure people can always find something they like based on their consumption preferences.
🏛️ Library — we maintain an obsessively curated library where all the content we create is organized by learning track and topic. This is crucial to make sure you can always find what you need, across 250+ articles.
💬 Community — the private community is where you can give and receive bespoke support from 900+ expert tech leaders. We get together for live calls, masterminds, book reviews, and more.
🪴 Coaching — this is new! We announced it just last week. You can now receive 1:1 support from professional engineering coaches, supported by the Refactoring content and ideas.
These pillars work as progressive ways to invest more into your professional growth, based on your appetite for it: they go from the most serendipitous and passive experience (newsletter articles), to the most targeted and interactive one (coaching), with everything in between 👇
💬 The Year of Community
For me, this was the year of the community. Members grew from 600 to 1000, and we doubled down on great activities, like Masterminds and the Book Club.
It is a curated space that truly feels like a family, where everyone supports each other and where we regularly get together and see each other face to face.
Masterminds, in particular, have been a huge success, thanks to the work of Joel and Melinda, who are now our official coaches-in-residence.
One of the challenges I have is explaining how unique it is to be able to access conversations and events facilitated by professional coaches, and participated by extremely accomplished tech leaders, at the price of a Refactoring subscription. Similar circles often cost thousands of dollars per year — no joke!
If you are interested in this, seriously, you should give it a try. It’s completely different from your standard Slack / Discord chat.
🎙️ The Year of the Podcast
2024 was also the year of the podcast. We recorded 30 interviews with some of the worlds’ most respected and well-known tech leaders, including the likes of DHH, Kent Beck, and Camille Fournier.
This was a big leap for me, as I had never done anything in video before. And the reception has been incredible: the podcast has been streamed in 83 countries, is in the top 10% of all video podcasts, and the rating is a perfect five! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
To me, interviews perfectly complement newsletter articles, providing real-world stories and more voices to Refactoring.
Next year we are doubling down on quality, and we’ll start Q1 with some awesome guests, including legends like Martin Fowler, Adam Wiggins, and Dan Shipper.
🎨 A New Logo
We are wrapping up this year by introducing our new logo!
In the age of AI and automation, Refactoring is still hand-crafted, hand-drawn, and thrives on human connection. So I created a new wordmark to reflect these vibes, doing all the lettering myself on Figma. It took way too many hours, but it was worth it!
Not only that: we are also introducing a new Refactoring font!
Until today, I did all the writing on drawings and video elements by hand, on my iPad. This was super time consuming, and allowed me to create fewer drawings and graphics that I would have liked.
So I spent another unresonable amount of hours creating a font that reflects my own handwriting, so that I can use it in Canva and Figma to create better drawings faster!
For those wondering how this works, I used FontForge, a bit old but still awesome open source app for macOS.
🚀 What comes next?
It ain’t over! This article is about this year, rather than the next, and we still have plenty to unveil, including a brand new library 🏛️ and some incredible guest authors 🖋️ that will join us. So stay tuned in the coming weeks!
The goal of Refactoring is to provide the best way for engineers and managers in tech to grow professionally, regularly, week over week.
If you like what you see, join us today to start the new year on the right foot!
🌟 The Best Articles of 2024
And finally, here are the 10 best articles I wrote this year, based on popularity and my personal preference:
🚢 How to Plan and Execute Software Projects — this is literally the most popular Refactoring article of all time. It’s a loong guide on planning software right, with a lot of opinionated takes and practical ideas.
🎲 Mental Models for Engineers and Managers — a collection of my 10 favorite mental models, plus a ton of resources.
📊 The State of Engineering Productivity — our first industry report! We collected deep insights about productivity from more than 200 engineers and managers.
🎽 How Engineering Management is Changing — we explored the trend of fewer managers, more technical work, and different careers, backed by real stories and podcast interviews.
🔍 Thoughts on Code Reviews — I threw down the gauntlet here and said code reviews are broken, and propose a small framework to do them better. High density of hot takes here.
📚 How I Read Books — my process for reading books, which has completely changed since we have the community book club. I read 12 books this year, my all-time record.
🎨 How to Become a Product Engineer — to me, this was the most important trend of the year. I am proud that we explored it in this article, which also works as a guide for engineers who want to get more into product.
🧪 How to do QA in 2024 — QA is a confusing practice. We explored it end-to-end (see what I did there?) thanks to an incredible Mastermind discussion.
📖 How to Create an Engineering Handbook — I am a note-taking nerd, and took on the task of creating effective docs basically everywhere I went. This article includes everything I know about creating good handbooks + the experience of people in the mastermind.
🪴 Generative Culture — culture is the quintessential fluffy topic. This article is my best attempt at writing something useful and practical about it, backed by a ton of great stories.
And that’s it for today! I wish you some amazing holidays surrounded by your loved ones.
See you in 2025! 👋
Luca
I love the font you created. Are you going to publish it in a way in which we can buy a usage license or something similar?