Introducing the new Refactoring! 📱

A brand new community platform that powers everything we do at Refactoring!

Apr 23, 2025

Hi everyone! Today we are making some of the biggest announcements in the history of Refactoring!

We are introducing a brand new community platform, available both on the web and as a native mobile app on iPhone and Android 🎉

We have a brand new native app for iPhone and Android!

The goal of the platform is to take everything we do at Refactoring and bring it together in a single place:

💬 Community — host all community conversations, events, and DMs.
🏛️ Library — store all the Refactoring articles, interviews, videos, and resources, in a form that is easy to consume, search, and filter.
🤖 AI Learning — use AI to help you go through all-things-Refactoring. A new chatbot is trained on all articles and community threads, and native AI summaries are available for all spaces and topics.

This is the result of several months of work, and I couldn’t be more proud of the result!

Quick plug! This is our highest-level work ever, so access to the app, the community, the library, and the AI, is exclusive to paid members of Refactoring.

If you want to support our work and become a better engineer and manager, you can subscribe below at just $15/mo or $150/year 👇

So, first of all here is a video walkthrough of the web version 👇

If you are a 🔒 paid subscriber 🔒 you can download the mobile app for iPhone or Android and login with your community credentials.

(if you are a paid subscriber and still don’t have access to the community, just reply to this email and I will sign you up!)

Now, let’s look at everything in more detail 👇

💬 Community

It all starts with the community. We are investing an incredible amount of time, effort, and money in making the Refactoring community the best software engineering community in the world.

Over the last four years we have learned a lot about what makes a community good. As of today, are the things that we are the most proud of:

🧵 Expert conversations — whenever someone asks a question or posts some challenge they have at work, they always receive plenty of awesome answers from true domain experts.
🏯 Good organization — thanks to the threaded structure, which resembles more of a subreddit than Slack or Discord, you never feel like you are missing out. The community never feels overwhelming or chaotic. It feels just right.
🗓️ High-quality events — we run a few, selected, high-quality live events on a monthly and bi-monthly basis. These are run by professional coaches and facilitators, and make people get to know each other and discuss their challenges more directly.

Our recent community review of Accelerate

So, here is a selection of what we do together:

➡️ Coming up — I anticipate newsletter articles I want to write, people join in with their own experiences and insights, and authors are quoted in the newsletter.
🧠 Mastermind — monthly sessions facilitated by Joel and Melinda, two professional coaches, where you meet other members and work through specific challenges.
📗 Book Club — every two months we read some famous non-fiction book and we review it together in a live event.
🥁 Show & Tell — people share what they are building, writing, or anything they are up to, to receive feedback and encouragement.
💼 Jobs — people post their openings and get vetted candidates from there. Many people have been hired this way already.

Now, this is the conversational part of the platform. But starting today, there is much more 👇

🏛️ Integrated Library

I have been running Refactoring for more than four years, during which I have written more than 300 articles.

This means, if you have any challenges at work, by now there’s a good chance I have written something about it already. But how do you know?

Starting today, you can find everything I have ever published inside the same community platform 👇

You can browse all the newsletter content and filter it by topic

In the Library section you will find all the articles I have ever written, the book reviews, the podcast interviews, and even the solo videos I started making recently. In a nutshell, it’s everything I have ever published, easily browsable and filterable by topic.

Articles are embedded inside the platform, so you can read and watch everything without going anywhere 👇

You can read individual essays without ever leaving the platform

And that’s not over! Because having everything in one place allows us to do more 👇

🔍 Search & AI

Merging content and community enables two amazing features: great search and great AI.

The community platform offers a unified search experience that can fetch content from both conversations and newsletter articles. This means that for any topic you surface both my own writing, and what others are saying.

Search is perfect for when you are looking for keywords and people, but sometimes you have questions — not keywords. For these cases, we are introducing the Refactoring AI agent.

Our agent lives in two places:

Search — when you search for anything, the agent option will pop up as an alternative (see above).
DMs — you can write to the agent just like you would do to a person.

For any question you may have, the agent will reply with an answer that 1) is complete and workable by itself, and 2) contains references from articles and threads it draws from.

It is simply the best way to figure out what I personally think about something, and what others in the community think.

📌 Bottom line

When I started Refactoring in 2020, newsletters were kind of niche, and Substack was a small, pretty obscure platform.

Fast forward to today, there exist thousands of tech newsletters. There’s an explosion of content online, and uber-powerful AI everywhere to which you can ask anything.

So, why should you subscribe to a newsletter in 2025? Let alone pay for it? This is the question we work hard to answer every day.

Our goal with Refactoring is to help engineers and managers do their best work. We believe in doing so through great content and great community. These work together:

We make people connect and exchange their respective experiences in the community, and
We synthesize such experience into stellar, timeless pieces of content for the newsletter.

This is a very human flywheel, and we are proud of it. We believe that community is indispensable in the age of AI, and we are doing our very best to support it.