2024 Wrapped: Newsletter, Coaching, Books
Big wins in 2024: Coaching and Training, Meeting Kent Beck, Dave Farley, Sander Hoogendoorn, Speaking at conferences, Book Contribution, Youtube Channel Success, groCTO
🔝 Best 2024 Posts
The articles below drove the most engagement, reposts, flame wars on LinkedIn and insightful DMs throughout the year.
Leadership, Culture, Continuous Delivery
Personal Favorites
The Nik Sumeiko episode was a GIANT live stream with over 350 attendees and is to date our biggest show.
The Requirements are Always Wrong, along with a few more TDD bits sparked plenty of direct conversation with Kent Beck and other leaders in tech. I thoroughly enjoy sparks of creativity and the opportunity to use the internet for what it’s for: talking to and with anyone in a wholesome manner.
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).
63 published posts on substack (down 40% from 2023)
PLUS: +33 groCTO posts (new!)
125k views on Substack alone (up 25%)
135 hours of streams and videos (up +200%tripple baby!)
9500 watch hours on linkedin and youtube (up ~170%)
223 coaching sessions across all my clients (up 17%)thank you!
+3 Conferences attended, with ~11 mentor sessions
12 Private Digital Coaching Meetups with other Coaches/fCTOs (new!)
On the NDA-protected side of things I can say that I had the wonderful opportunity to work with a dozen teams this year helping them improve their engineering culture, adopt continuous delivery and better testing automation habits.
I helped a handful of my 1-on-1 mentees on MentorCruise land new jobs despite the current market climate.
📙 Master Software Architecture
Maciej “
” surprised me with an opportunity to write a foreword to his book debut Master Software Architecture. One of my goals in 2024 was to get my hands dirty with publishing a book beyond just a simple ebook or booklet. But the complexity and reality of the time investment hit me.I still managed to follow through partially with my contribution to Maciej’s efforts. Happy to help out, bud! You can get a digital or physical copy of the book here.
🏔 Our Tech Journey
Pairing up with
under the OTJ banner definitely launched us into a higher tier of success with the podcasts and streams.Schedule
We settled on one 1hr stream on Wednesdays 4pm CET, down from 2x 2hour streams as popularity picked up. Partly due to our success in our individual coaching and tech businesses, and also to free up more time to focus on the production quality and bringing on quality guests on the show.
The numbers, activity and participation have been very generous throughout 2024 and it will continue to be our focus for 2025 with somewhat more ambitious goals regarding content density.
🕺Conferences
I spoke at StripeCon Ljubljana and HowToWeb 2024 In Bucharest this year on topics of Productive Engineering Management and Extreme Programming Disciplines (notably Fearless, High-performing Teams).
I have my eye out for HowToWeb 2025 and potential WeAreDevelopers in Berlin. Still clearing out schedule conflicts. I’ll keep you posted.
🔮 Newsletter Updates
I’ve involved myself in writing for four different Substack publications this year. Right now I’m sticking with two—this one as my focus and groCTO as a more structured weekly aggregate. groCTO helped me get a regular cadence that I would otherwise miss, though it did put some a strain on consistently writing for both.
groCTO Webinars
groCTO is a publication backed by the Founders of Typo.AI, a Software Engineering Intelligence platform focusing on engineering habits, DevEx, SPACE and Dora metrics for modern teams. I’ve been active on their community-building side of things by writing the weekly groCTO Bytes for the better part of the year now.
It also gave me opportunities to co-host the Typo webinars on Engineering Culture, Leadership and Continuous Delivery topics. The highlight was a conversation with Dave Farley 🥂
I spoke with Dave Farley on Test-Driven Development and DORA Metrics
“I think that software engineering is one of the most important things that we do in our society. It matters a lot. We ought to be better at it in our industry. And I think [this] is how we get better at it.“
🔒 Paid content experimentation continues
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).
Auto-paywall after 30 days is a hit and miss
I love automation. I don’t think that has to be emphasised. It definitely helped me with organizing this substack to a finer degree, including keeping the paid tier fair with regards to free subscribers’ benefits.
However, I am not a full-time Substack content creator. Unlike giants like Lenny at Lenny’s Newsletter and Luca from Refactoring I am primarily conducting myself with Coaching Tech Leaders and Teams, along with Research into Continuous Delivery and Extreme Programming practices, notably TDD adoption.
Therefore, I will not price it in the “professional tier” of 25-60$/mth with heavy paywall just yet. I need to figure out a better value proposition that better aligns with my mission. However, the paid subs are there to stay as many of you have expressed an appreciation for the streams, booklets, linkedin advice, private conversation and free coaching coffees ☕️ by paying for a subscription as a sign of Patronage, rather than for the content. I appreciate you.
In addition, I will move my Paywall lower in the articles, giving you more access so that most of you get to benefit from “the meat” and the paid sections will cover more experimental and hype-driven topics like AI testing tips and checklists. I want the paid tier to benefit primarily through active participation, community, coaching and/or requested articles on topics from someone in the audience.
Vision— it would be great in the near-to-mid future to have the substack paid tier grow to the point where I can re-pay the financial side with forms of service, active or passive. I kickstarted a low-tier async comms coaching offer on MentorCruise for low-intensity coaching and mentoring as an entry-level tier. I see some overlap with what this Substack’s Paid (or Founder) tier may become throughout 2025 and bring together a private community focused on active engineering coaching and/or training in an asynchronous manner.
Removing Slack Community and OTJ Circle.so
There was little-to-no activity with the async chat communities. This also predated Substack adding Notes and Chat, which I suppose put a nail on the coffin due to the small scale. I will continue to monitor this, along with feasibility for alternatives like Discord and Mastodon.
📚 [Book Club] News
The Book Club grew to ~150 members in total by June, with approximately 20 regulars. We managed to talk to Kent Beck as a highlight to our January reading month with Tidy First?
But…
sadly I had to put the book club on hold. Mostly for personal reasons—I couldn’t commit to afternoon zoom calls to the degree that was required to maintain quality and consistency. It’s rough, I enjoyed the casual nature of the calls and the wholesome vibe we maintained. But alas, it was not sustainable.
I let the book club self-organise for a while and it picked up well for a few weeks but ultimately without the push and consistent fuel from my side I laid it to rest so everyone can spend their time more productively.
Ultimately it was well-received within its short run, we had a few very good speed reading workshops along with brilliant conversations regarding the books, with Kent joining being the highlight.
🙏 Thank you!
And on a personal note, it’s been year two with the kiddos for me and my partner. Things are normalising, I’m putting more focus on my health and sleep which definitely helps with keeping energy levels high after a rough, but fulfilling first year. We just spent a wonderful Christmas together and are recharging for a strong push into the new year.
Big love
Cheers 🥂
—D
Was great to have you as a foreword author mate!
Wish you a great 2025 :)