2023 in Review, Newsletter and Community Updates
🔝 Best articles in 2023
The articles below drove the most engagement, reposts, flame wars on linkedin and insightful DMs throughout the year.
Leadership & culture
Architecture
TDD & DDD
📚 [Book Club] News
After a short break, the book club continues in the 2nd week of January 2024. I’ve been collecting feedback on our first three months so far. Here’s the upcoming changes:
Book choices will be community lead. We have a vote underway right now for Q1 2024. You may join to vote, especially if we have a book on the list that you’d be interested in joining the book club for.
Schedule updated to cover multiple timezones. Rather than having only one time on a rigid recurrence, the calls are now on different days and parts of day to accommodate everyone. We promote a pragmatic, non-linear way of reading and there’s no need to make all the calls, so we’re making it more accessible.
Meeting 3 times per month (down from 4). The speed reading workshop is now separate and on-demand for new members.
Stats
Subscriber growth has been stellar over the months following my summer holiday. I aim to invest the revenue from the newsletter into Our Tech Journey and SaaS costs for our communities (OTJ, Book Club, video editing).
150 published posts
60 hours of streams and videos
4000 watch hours on linkedin and youtube
98k views on Substack alone
190 coaching sessions across all my clientsthank you!
🏔 Our Tech Journey
Our weekly streams with Adrian are taking a new form. Beginning last few weeks the Wednesday and Thursday streams are flying the banner of Our Tech Journey, covering interesting topics for you about engineering culture. Areas of interest cover the vertical of engineering manager, staff and CTO in small-to-medium businesses, especially european startups.
We aim to host a series of community-driven events and funnel extra benefits for paid subscribers of both our newsletters into this joint effort.
🔮 Newsletter Updates
This newsletter started as a long-form alternative to long discussions on LinkedIn and private coaching meetings. I posted daily for the first 3 months to match my linkedin content when you, the newsletter audience starting having an identity of your own.
I now post a handful of longer articles every month, coupled with content-rich audience-driven video streams. The rest of the emails you’re receiving are updates and recaps from these community sessions.
🔒 Experimenting with paid content
As a continued pledge to you—the articles I am posting will always be fully available for free at time of posting, with the exception of Booklet previews for paid subscribers who have early access (that’s still free at launch, but you don’t get it immediately).
In addition, I’m experimenting with Substack’s feature to auto-archive posts older than 30 days, moving them over to the paid tier. If you’re a free subscriber you’ll never miss out on any paywalled posts while giving a tiered incentive for new audiences, even if they decide on the free one.
The paid subscriber slack access will now also extend to the upcoming Our Tech Journey Community. More on this later. I noticed many of you have expressed your gratitude and support for the streams in particular by subscribing to Adrian’s and this newsletter. We’re making the logistics of that somewhat easier and giving better goodies in return in the future.
🙏 Thank you!
At the end of the day it all comes back to community and our loved ones. Amidst everything that was happening this year, the biggest joy and gratitude for me are certainly coming from celebrating our little one’s first birthday soon.
Great work Denis! And happy birthday to the little ones :)