A small gift for 2024 Christmas Holidays
A reflection about 2024, my goals for 2025, and a small gift for you: a curated list of people to follow to become better with Software Development.
Hello, developers! 🚀
Welcome back to the Learn Agile Practices newsletter, your weekly dose of insights to power up your software development journey through Agile Technical Practices and Methodologies!
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Now, let's dive into today's micro-topic!
In short
No TLDR for special editions like this.
A year of change and growth
2024 has been a challenging year for me: it was supposed to be the year where I proved myself as an important software engineer in my international company.
I was working for an international travel-tech startup, and my main goal was to build some trust so that I could start initiatives to improve the evident problems we had: it was one of those full-remote startup where async was not only suggested as default, but treated as the best way of working when remote. We worked with long-living feature branches, and developers was kept too far from the business.
I don’t believe in this.
I don’t believe in async PRs within a business context.
I don’t believe in programmers treated as “ticket executors”.
As you all know, I strongly favor “real collaboration”: sync reviews, pair programming, ensemble programming, short branches, and keeping software developers close to business.
After a while, it became clear that improving this thing was almost impossible, and this caused a lower in my engagement and enthusiasm over the work. Then, also business side started to struggle in remaining competitive - and a huge opportunity came in for me, so I decided for an unexpected change.
In October, I joined Muffin - an italian fintech startup focused on subsidized finance - as a Lead Software Engineer/Head of Development. Muffin product has around 1 year of development history, all executed through an external software development team. With my hiring, along with a Head of Product, we are now going to build the first internal product team for Muffin.
As you can imagine, this was such a great opportunity, and considering also the problem with the previous job, I couldn’t do anything else but accept. So far, has been great: I’ve been welcomed warmly, and me and Luca (the Head of Product) started to work together and build the foundation for the Product culture and team of the company. 2025 will be an amazing year for us!
In addition to my main work, I also kept working on my experience as Technical Coach, offering some talks and workshop around topics such as:
Test-Driven Development
Trunk-Based Development
Continuous Integration / Delivery
This was just the beginning of my path to offer some continuous improvement services to software developers looking for ways to become better software developers faster.
Sustainable pace of improvement
My main improvement point for 2025 is related to continuous improvement: I wasn’t able to keep the rhythm over this year, and I studied a bit less than expected.
That’s fine: the new job had a big impact on this, since it took me all of my energies to quickly join the reality and start understanding how things were going. At the same time, while I was suffering for the previous job, I found it harder than usual to focus after work: this was depressing because it made me feel blocked and stressed.
My objective is to identify the sustainable pace of improvement for the upcoming year: currently, I plan to study 6 books, the same as this year, and invest any other remaining time in putting things into practice.
This year, I’m also experimenting the way I define my objectives: this year, I started from the 6 bigger questions I want to find an answer to, and every book I choosed is supposed to be a good answer to each of those question.
Here are my 6 questions for 2025:
I know the main techniques I can use to hide work in progress in Trunk based development, but there may be more of it - or any other tips from people doing it for decades? ➡️ Trunk-based development
Over the years, I focused on becoming expert in OOP since I mostly worked with OOP based languages - but now I work on a Typescript-based backend app and I feel that adding more functional programming skills is fundamental. How do I improve in functional programming? ➡️ From Objects to Functions
The team needs to raise the bar of technical excellence, and I want to help them and coach them through this improvement path. How to effectively coach technical skills to the team? ➡️ Technical Agile Coaching with the Samman Method
I hate estimates. A bunch of great people in the software development world suggest you can live without estimates: it is totally clear on a weekly basis, but it’s always useful to have a plan, so how do you build a roadmap without estimates? ➡️ When will it be done? Agile forecasting
How can I build a productive team without losing effectiveness? ➡️ Peopleware
I’m new as a Tech Lead - what can I learn from other’s experiences? ➡️ Talking with Tech Leads
Curated list of creators
This is my small gift for this year: I want to suggest you the top 8 of people I follow to participate into discussion related to my favourite topics: Lean, XP, Agile, DevOps, and Software Development in general.
There are much more out there, so I picked those that I interact also the most. I also tried to balance 4 italians. with 4 non italians, to cover all of my audience.
Go follow them! :)
Andrea Laforgia ➡️ Sometimes provocative, but always on point, Andrea daily share thoughts around technical excellence topics and best practices.
Michele Sollecito ➡️ I met Michele on LinkedIn exactly for the same reason I’m suggesting him here: he continuously share his knowledge and experience around software development technical excellence.
Luca Rossi ➡️ You probably know his newsletter (Refactoring.fm): I don’t always agree with him, but his experience and the amount of knowledge he share weekly has an incredible quality.
Jacopo Romei ➡️ I’m not sure I will ever become a freelance, but if I do, I will follow Jacopo tips for sure. He is the author of Extreme Contracts, and he generally share tips around freelancing, including the contracts side of it, work effectiveness, and remote work.
Allen Holub ➡️ Allen has decades of experience in software development, and this is reflected in the amount of knowledge he is able to share through his content, where he generally face technical excellence, especialyl topics such as no-estimates and Lean.
Dragan Stepanović ➡️ The biggest supporter of Trunk-based development and CI/CD I know: his talk about how async Pull-Requests are ineffective is amazing.
Valentina Jemuovic ➡️ She covers all the practices that I learned to call Agile Practices, from Pair/Ensemble, to DDD, Hexagonal architecture, CQRS/ES, etc.
Daniel Moka ➡️ He focuses mostly on TDD, offering clear and concise learning content around the topic!
Until next time, happy coding! 🤓👩💻👨💻