Say hello to the new Learn Agile Practices!
Welcome to the new home of continuous improvement and learning for Software Developers, an ecosystem of multiple different content to help programmer unlock their full potential.
Hey, dev!
I'm Dan, the creator of Learning Agile Practices, and I'd like to personally update you about our community: as a subscriber of this newsletter, you are part of a community of professionals who are dedicated to learning about and implementing Agile practices.
After the first six months, it was time for me to work on the feedback I got from all of you and start making it something a bit more structured: my objective is to make this an actual income stream, something I can dedicate more than simply my spare time.
In order to do that, I decided to approach this professionally and start with a rebranding!
In this email, I will give you some details about this rebranding, and make sure that you have clear what advantages you have as a free subscriber and what can you get with our new paid services, plus delivering your free gift as a subscriber!
A brand new look
This time, I wanted to create a real brand, a professional one, and there are 2 main steps I had to take:
Describe my Mission, Vision and Values
Create a logo
Describe my Mission, Vision and Values
As you can read in this very cool article, the mission “states why a company exists and what its purpose is”, the vision is “an aspirational statement that communicates what the business hopes to achieve in the long-term”, and the values are there to “inform every aspect of building the brand, including visual design”.
So I started asking myself why I created LAP in the first place, and what is moving me today to take all of this to the next level.
I strongly believe that an actual “senior” Developer is one that has business success as its first priority. To be able to help business succeed, we have to make the right choices with the right trade-offs and to do that I strongly believe that the most powerful tools we can use are Agile practices that lead to technical excellence, like TDD, Pair/Mob Programming, CI/CD principles, DDD, etc.
You can read the full Manifesto to discover the Mission, Vision and Values I choose to identify this strong belief I just described.
Create a logo
To create a logo, at the very least you need to figure out two things:
The colour palette
The icon
The colour palette was an easy one, because I basically already have a starting point with the old logo, so I only had to tune it up a bit.
The icon was hard: I wanted something original, avoiding typical logos for tech newsletters like PC, keyboards, people coding, monitors, etc. I was looking for something that could be identified as Agile, and I started looking for everything that could remember the TDD cycle in some way.
Then, in a moment of relaxation, while I was reordering home to plan my new home office desk setup, I found my old fidget spinner and started playing with it… and then the idea came up! Why not use it as the icon?
The “fidget spinner” toy has been promoted as helping people who have trouble focusing or those who may need to fidget to relieve nervous energy, anxiety, or psychological stress.
“Relieve nervous energy, anxiety, psychological stress”
This reminds me of some of the main objectives of implementing agile practices in software product development: removing stress and anxiety from the work, and setting up a psychologically safe environment.
I love fidget spinners, which is my preferred anti-stress game, and here’s why I choose it for the logo!
So here is our new logo - what do you think about it?
What to expect?
So, what can you expect from the LAP newsletter from now on?
The newsletter schedule will remain the same: every Tuesday at 7 am I’ll be sending you an email containing original content on Agile practices, including articles, case studies, and best practices. My goal is to help you stay up to date with the latest trends and techniques in Agile, so you can apply them to your work and achieve better results, respecting my Mission.
The structure will be similar, but better - for example, you can enjoy our new header and footer in this email already. Publications will start again in two weeks, on the 9 of May.
Micro-learning course access on EdApp will not be available anymore for free subscribers, because those are now part of the Premium LAP subscription service - I will add details on paid services later - all current free subscriber will lose their access to EdApp on May 1st.
To make me forgive about putting micro-learning on paid service, all free subscribers get a couple of gifts!
The first gift is a PDF containing the list of the 3 books to read in order to become a TDD master! Those books helped me and hundreds of developers to before really productive with TDD and raise the bar of the quality and speed of our work!
The second gift is a special discount code for future purchases. Use the following code at checkout to receive 25% off your next purchase.
LAPEARLY25
Check the footer of this email to discover our paid products and services: you can use this code for any of them!
I really want to thank you again for being one of the first subscribers and supporters of Learn Agile Practices, and really hope that you will enjoy this new, better version of it!
Dan the dev