Exciting Changes Ahead: AgileBits is coming! The next steps for Learn Agile Practices
In the last 5 years, I've started creating content mostly for a reason: improve my learning. My content offer over time increased, elevating the value for me and my users. It's time for another step.
📌 In case you missed it last week
Last newsletter issue:
London vs Chicago: The two ways of TDD 🔀: Whenever you get closer to TDD, you discover that two main approaches (schools) exist: they are called London School and Chicago School. But what are the differences? Let's see it together!
Read the full article and all the previous ones in our archive.
Video Podcast (ITA):
The Weekly Pomodoro #8 - Some tips for wannabe/junior Developers trying to enter the IT job market
Watch episodes on YouTube here, or listen on Podcast using Spreaker or Spotify.
Exciting Changes Ahead: AgileBits is coming! The next steps for Learn Agile Practices
Hello, developers! 🚀
Today, it’s not the usual newsletter issue from my side. It’s announcement time!
Some changes are coming soon, especially to this newsletter but also in the entire Learn Agile Practices ecosystem - changes that will impact all the content I create, the way I do it, and enable all my plans for the future - and with today’s issue I want to make you all aware of what’s coming; I will do some social media announcement for sure, but my subscribers deserve a deeper preview.
In the next lines, you will discover what’s coming and what are my plans for the end of this year, but first, let me share why this change is happening.
A real ecosystem for continuous improvement
As some of you might already know, all this content creation work I do was born 5 years ago by the need to improve my approach to learning: I can say that this worked brilliantly because creating content is such a great way to challenge myself not only in understanding enough on the topic but also being able to talk or write about it.
In this path, I understood that what I want to become is a role that I don’t think exists and I call Technical Agile Coach: as software masterminds try to explain since always, I strongly believe that for a company to be Agile, and ensure that software becomes a real enabler of business success, we need technical excellence, and I want to keep learning how to achieve that and how to support teams in achieving it.
I’m convinced that technical excellence is a lot about practices and methodologies, and in general about the way the team works, and not just mere technical knowledge about specific technologies. To be more clear: doing TDD or Pair/Ensemble is much more important than knowing everything about a specific technology, and there’s evidence about this; that’s why I completely fell in love with what I call the “Agile Practices”: Test-Driven Development, Pair/Ensemble Programming, Trunk-Based Development, Continuous Integration, Domain-Driven Design, and so on.
I’m far away from being a master on all of that, which is my ambitious plan - but still, I learn every day to be sure I improve my knowledge of them and advocate for them in the most effective way possible.
Therefore, I continuously reflect on how to evolve my Learn Agile Practices ecosystem to ensure I’m on the right path to achieve my objectives - and in recent months I’ve been asking myself some questions:
What are my real objectives?
Why do I like all this work I do?
Do I want to monetize this? If yes, how?
My objectives are all pretty clear to me:
creating content for learning purposes (Feynman technique)
become a leader in Software Developer as a Technical Agile Coach
make Learn Agile Practices grow continuously
I think that the first two points are already fulfilled by the current work so continuing on this path would be enough - but you know, if you don’t move forward you actually go back: things need to change and evolve, and I feel that without a regular income, it will become almost impossible to keep growing to Learn Agile Practices as I want to.
Therefore, this means I want this to become a real side hustle, so yes: I want to start monetizing this at some point, somehow. No need to rush, I need to keep this sustainable, but still, I need to take a different direction to be able to offer something worth paying.
The things that I like the most are coaching and mentoring other developers (or wannabe devs) in fulfilling their objectives and growing faster as Software Developers, putting my experience at their disposal. I also love writing, so the newsletter is great, but writing very long and deep articles like the one I’ve sent since last summer is a huge amount of work to do every week constantly.
This is mostly a matter of sustainability that impacts me as a professional and human being, but can also harm the quality of the work - I don’t want to rush to meet the “weekly deadline”, I want to give such articles the love they deserve.
At the same time, I’m also sure that if I try to monetize somehow, is not because I write more but because I offer more chances to gather knowledge from me and the community conversations - I like to use such kind of content to describe the topics I talk about and advocate, then if I have to monetize I want to offer something more tailored to help people grow.
To finish, one last consideration about newsletters: I’m subscribed to a lot of them, and only a couple of them send very long content, very rarely. I think that the best characteristic of a good, effective newsletter is to be small and effective, giving you something every time you receive it. We are overwhelmed by quantity today, so I want to focus more on quality.
Considering all of these, I came up with my new plan.
What’s new?
As I said before, I like to describe LAP as an “ecosystem”, more specifically an “Ecosystem of Continuous Improvement for Software Developers”. This ecosystem already exists in some of his pieces, but today it is missing the glue that puts it all together in one place.
That’s why the first announcement is that Learn Agile Practices now has a website: learnagilepractices.com. On the website, which is 90% done but still under construction, you can find all the things about LAP: who I am, why I do it, and all the types of content you can access.
At the same time, to fulfill the thoughts I shared before, the content catalog is evolving:
first of all, this newsletter will change format: there will be a pause next week, and then I will be back with a new issue under the publication name of AgileBits; the newsletter will move to a micro-learning format: every email will be readable in around 5 minutes, will focus on a micro-topic and will be structured and written with even more focus on learning - the objective is to ensure that every week, after reading my email, you have the feeling of a small improvement; considering the big difference in the current format, that is mostly very long content without a proper structure, all the old issues will be removed from Substack archive, but don’t worry, they will not disappear…
the home for all the past and future long-form content, including the old issues of this newsletter, is the brand new blog hosted on the website, called The Agile Echo; in the blog, I will publish a variegated offer of long articles, with deep-dives into wide topics, and also more practical articles such as tutorials, katas experiments; almost all the old issue of the newsletter have already been published on the blog, and the others are coming soon: you can discover the blog here.
the third type of content is the Video Podcast, which also has some changes coming: no pause in this case, but I will start including English episodes for the Weekly Pomodoro, alternating the language every week; the reason is that, while it’s fundamental for my plans to start producing the podcast in English, I also want to still produce Italian content about programming to contribute to the local community; the monthly Dev Debate episodes will also remain in Italian for now, but I will probably have some English episodes from time to time. Subscribe to YouTube, Spreaker, or Spotify to listen to it!
In addition to the free content, I keep offering my services in the form of free mentorship and paid coaching for Software Developers who want some help in growing their Seniority more effectively to give a boost to their career - I currently run multiple free mentorship with different devs with different seniority, from wannabe and junior devs to more experienced one, and. try to share my experience and knowledge the more I can to support their path, especially when they are not sure of what move to do next.
For those who have a clearer idea and want to focus specifically on growing their technical skills, especially on Agile practices such as OOP, TDD, Pair/Ensemble Programming, CI, Trunk-Based, etc. - the Personal Coaching service is available in the form of 30min or 60 min sessions. Usually, after a free session to set up the path, and a first test paid session, I set up a longer path with package discounts.
You can discover my customer testimonials here to see what they say about me and understand what help I might give you! If you are interested in the mentorship program, you can schedule a session here: I’m always happy to chat with other professionals, so feel free to take advantage of it, and let’s meet!
If you are already interested in a coaching session, instead, you can schedule a session from here - but I always suggest starting with free mentorship so we can know each other before starting a path together.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this email, these changes are enabling me to set up the LAP ecosystem in a way that will more easily allow me to introduce new features - and after the summer you will start to see what’s going to happen around here!
I promise it will be amazing!
Thanks for your support, feel free to let me know what you think about this - my social profiles or email are always available for you to contact me. See you in 2 weeks, with the new AgileBits format publication!
Until next time, happy coding! 🤓👩💻👨💻
One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.
[Abraham Maslow]