The Hybrid Hacker Joins 🌀 Refactoring!

A new adventure begins for The Hybrid Hacker!

When I started The Hybrid Hacker in January 2023, my primary goal was to build consistency in my writing without any grand expectations.

Since then, so much has changed, and today, I’m thrilled to share one of the most significant updates yet

I’m incredibly proud to announce that The Hybrid Hacker has been acquired by Refactoring, and I’m joining their family too!

Refactoring is one of the most well-established and renowned newsletters in the tech industry, making this milestone particularly exciting.

🔥 TLDR

You probably have a lot of questions, so if you just want to know what is going to happen, here is a brief summary.

❤️ The Hybrid Hacker has been acquired by Refactoring

HH is becoming part of the Refactoring family with the goal of creating a single, bigger, and better engineering publication.

🌀 I will join the Refactoring family as a part-time writer

I will partner with Luca and write monthly in-depth articles about Engineering, Leadership, and Productivity.

🚀 What happens next

There will be no major changes for the next few weeks. You will continue to receive one long-form article per week in the style of HH and Refactoring, written by either me or Luca (Refactoring’s author).

Eventually, as part of the merge, you will be joining the Refactoring family. We will explain this clearly moving forward, and you will be able to opt out of anything you don’t want or like.

Our goal is to create the world’s best publication & community about engineering leadership. We can’t wait to make you see what we are building!

If you are interested in the full story, in true HH style, let’s take a step back and walk through the process that led us here.

🕰️ Some Background

When I started writing The Hybrid Hacker, my only goal was to write every week for at least one year.

Throughout my career, I’ve built consistency in many areas, but I always struggled to be consistent with writing, especially in English, which is not my native language.

As usual, I aim to become an expert when I start something new. In this case, I had to start from scratch because I only had a vague idea of how to write and grow a newsletter.

The Beginning

I began by looking at other newsletters, which is how I discovered Refactoring.

When I started reading it, I immediately realized it wasn’t just a simple newsletter like many others.

It was a real product and a very well-crafted one at that.

It offered more than just thoughts or ideas shared through weekly articles.

Specifically, it included:

• In-depth essays about software engineering and leadership topics

• Hours of research condensed in every post

• A simple way of explaining complex matters

• Beautiful drawings to make the readings lighter and more enjoyable

• A huge amount of actionable resources (templates, exercises, etc.)

• A private community of experienced leaders

I literally fell in love with this approach, turning something often boring like a newsletter into a real and enjoyable tool to help you grow in your career. I started taking a lot of inspiration from it to shape my own newsletter.

After some time, I also met Luca, Refactoring’s author, who lives in Italy like me. That was another surprise.

One of the biggest problems we usually have in Italy is competing too much with each other instead of joining forces to have a greater impact. Despite my great love for my country, I have always hated this.

With Luca, it was very different.

Despite me taking a lot of inspiration from his newsletter, he immediately started supporting my work, and I did the same.

The Peak

After the first 6-7 months (by July 2023), during which I experimented a lot, my newsletter started growing quickly.

My mindset shifted from simply maintaining consistency to building a side hustle.

I started investing all my spare time in it, particularly:

• 🎨 Taking a design course to add beautiful drawings to my articles

• 💬 Posting daily on LinkedIn to grow my audience

• 🤝 Reaching out to other writers for mutual support

• 🏡 Building a private community of ~100 creators

• 💸 Adding paid plans to the newsletter

• 📢 Looking for sponsorships

By the end of 2023, I had almost 25k subscribers, which seemed absolutely insane.

Moreover, I had paying subscribers and occasional sponsorships.

The tasks became numerous:

• Conducting extensive research for my content (during weekends) to maintain high-quality

• Writing my articles (waking up at 3 am one day per week)

• Posting daily on LinkedIn (1 hour every early morning)

• Managing a community

• Keeping in touch with sponsors and responding to my paid subscribers

The Struggle

While all of this felt incredibly rewarding, I started to struggle with writing and keeping the quality high, and what was once a pleasure began to feel like a burden.

Despite my well-established routine, balancing a full-time job and a side hustle made it inevitable to start stealing time from my family.

I remember realizing this a few weeks ago when my 5-year-old daughter came into my home office and asked:

Daddy, can you play with me, or do you have to write the newsletter?

That was when I knew I had to change something.

🌀 Refactoring to the Rescue!

I began searching for a solution based on these assumptions:

• ✍️ I enjoyed writing, but I couldn’t maintain the same pace. However, a weekly newsletter undoubtedly has a bigger impact than a monthly one.

• 🎯 I didn’t want to lower the quality of this newsletter; writing to generate traffic was never my intent.

• 💪 I didn’t want to waste all the effort and value I generated through a year of hard work and sacrifices.

• 🙏 I didn’t want to disappoint my readers, especially those who invested in my work by buying paid subscriptions.

The only solution that could satisfy all these assumptions was to find someone interested in acquiring THH and keeping me on board.

In the past, I was approached a couple of times by newsletter marketplaces that offered to find buyers for my newsletter. I was impressed by the valuations, but it all felt pretty cold. Selling my beloved newsletter to a stranger, who might disregard all the effort I put in over the last 18 months, didn’t feel right.

So, I decided to talk openly to Luca about my struggles, and it was the best decision ever.

Not only did Luca agree to acquire THH, but he was also kind enough to welcome me to the Refactoring family as a part-time writer!

As mentioned earlier, I have always admired Luca and the work he has done.

Joining Refactoring today feels like joining the Avengers or playing in the A-League!

Luca and I are incredibly excited to begin this new adventure, and we hope you share our enthusiasm! There’s a lot to look forward to in the coming months!

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✌️ That’s all folks

That's all for today! As always, I would love to hear from my readers (and if you've made it this far, you're one of the bravest). Please don't hesitate to connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter and send a message. I always respond to everyone!