5 ms·

Developer Book Club

96 points by turingbook 10y ago

Cpoll 10y ago
I've started one of these, a few months ago. It worked pretty well until we picked ng-book, and interest tapered off. My observation is that if the book is too relevant to the day-job, people will just end up talking about work problems, and enthusiasm will wane. It's also possible that purely language/framework books don't work as well. Code Complete is good because it gets people talking about architecture, general best-practices, and career mastery. ng-book only gets people talking about the framework. To revive ours, we've discussed reading relevant articles rather than entire books.
- swanson 10y ago
  > It's also possible that purely language/framework books That has been my experience. The best book club discussions (we do probably 10 different groups a year for 5+ years at this point) have been for books like The Pragmatic Programmer, Rework, Lean Startup, etc -- ones that focus more on a methodology or have room for discussion about trade-offs. Framework/language specific books tend towards the reference material side of things and don't have much room for discussion. One exception is the Seven Languages in Seven Weeks book -- we would work the exercises on our own and then meet together to discuss and share our solutions.
Jtsummers 10y ago
Anyone here have suggestions for introducing this sort of concept into an office with bosses that get stingy with company time? We're too geographically distributed to do this effectively in our off hours, unfortunately.
cableshaft 10y ago
We didn't introduce books to read at our company, but we did start what we call 'dev learning sessions'. Once a week, one of the developers (it cycles by name) has to prepare and present about a topic approved by an architect (pretty much as long as it might be used somehow at work, it's approved). Then everyone spends about an hour learning about something. Sometimes it's something internal, but often it's a deeper dive into a particular topic regarding database, language, or sql features. We've been doing it for about a year now, and it's getting harder to come up with new topics, but overall it's worked out pretty well. It ends up that you have to give a presentation about once every three or four months. Personally I've learned quite a bit that I probably wouldn't have otherwise, even when I was the one giving the presentations. When it's your turn it can take up to a full day to research and prepare the presentation though, especially if you want to have working source code and it's about a topic you're not too familiar with.
tbirrell 10y ago
Nice idea. If there was an online version of this, I would participate. I can't be bothered to take more time out of my day to physically go somewhere though.
snug 10y ago
The company I work for offers a few chapters from one of the books on the list, "Building Microservices." Not trying to promote (most people probably know NGINX and you can ask not to be contacted about our commercial product), but it's a great book, just started here 2 months ago and it was a great book to help with here, as a lot of discussions we have are moving to MicroServices. Here's a link. https://www.nginx.com/blog/building-microservices-free-ebook-oreilly-nginx/ https://www.nginx.com/blog/building-microservices-free-ebook...
techman9 10y ago
My old team used to do this. We were an SRE/Ops focused team so we were making our way through the Google SRE book, trying to see which practices or lessons we could apply to our team and company. I found it a super positive experience, as we had a chance to reflect on our team in the context of "established" best practices and look at what aspects of their process made sense to apply to our organization. Also, that book is quite good and it was fun to have some pressure to read a couple sections every week.
markwaldron 10y ago
This would be great if they could be quickly downloaded in a specific format. I'd love to have a lot of these on my Kindle. Thank you for uploading this
Chris2048 10y ago
Howabout a meetup, no need to restrict to work right?
- kzisme 10y ago
  I can see some people being opposed to spending time outside of work - talking about tech/work stuff though. (I'm not included in this group).

96 points by turingbook 10y ago

Cpoll 10y ago

I've started one of these, a few months ago. It worked pretty well until we picked ng-book, and interest tapered off. My observation is that if the book is too relevant to the day-job, people will just end up talking about work problems, and enthusiasm will wane. It's also possible that purely language/framework books don't work as well. Code Complete is good because it gets people talking about architecture, general best-practices, and career mastery. ng-book only gets people talking about the framework. To revive ours, we've discussed reading relevant articles rather than entire books.

swanson 10y ago
> It's also possible that purely language/framework books That has been my experience. The best book club discussions (we do probably 10 different groups a year for 5+ years at this point) have been for books like The Pragmatic Programmer, Rework, Lean Startup, etc -- ones that focus more on a methodology or have room for discussion about trade-offs. Framework/language specific books tend towards the reference material side of things and don't have much room for discussion. One exception is the Seven Languages in Seven Weeks book -- we would work the exercises on our own and then meet together to discuss and share our solutions.

Jtsummers 10y ago

Anyone here have suggestions for introducing this sort of concept into an office with bosses that get stingy with company time? We're too geographically distributed to do this effectively in our off hours, unfortunately.

cableshaft 10y ago

We didn't introduce books to read at our company, but we did start what we call 'dev learning sessions'. Once a week, one of the developers (it cycles by name) has to prepare and present about a topic approved by an architect (pretty much as long as it might be used somehow at work, it's approved). Then everyone spends about an hour learning about something. Sometimes it's something internal, but often it's a deeper dive into a particular topic regarding database, language, or sql features. We've been doing it for about a year now, and it's getting harder to come up with new topics, but overall it's worked out pretty well. It ends up that you have to give a presentation about once every three or four months. Personally I've learned quite a bit that I probably wouldn't have otherwise, even when I was the one giving the presentations. When it's your turn it can take up to a full day to research and prepare the presentation though, especially if you want to have working source code and it's about a topic you're not too familiar with.

tbirrell 10y ago

Nice idea. If there was an online version of this, I would participate. I can't be bothered to take more time out of my day to physically go somewhere though.

snug 10y ago

The company I work for offers a few chapters from one of the books on the list, "Building Microservices." Not trying to promote (most people probably know NGINX and you can ask not to be contacted about our commercial product), but it's a great book, just started here 2 months ago and it was a great book to help with here, as a lot of discussions we have are moving to MicroServices. Here's a link. https://www.nginx.com/blog/building-microservices-free-ebook-oreilly-nginx/ https://www.nginx.com/blog/building-microservices-free-ebook...

techman9 10y ago

My old team used to do this. We were an SRE/Ops focused team so we were making our way through the Google SRE book, trying to see which practices or lessons we could apply to our team and company. I found it a super positive experience, as we had a chance to reflect on our team in the context of "established" best practices and look at what aspects of their process made sense to apply to our organization. Also, that book is quite good and it was fun to have some pressure to read a couple sections every week.

markwaldron 10y ago

This would be great if they could be quickly downloaded in a specific format. I'd love to have a lot of these on my Kindle. Thank you for uploading this

Chris2048 10y ago

Howabout a meetup, no need to restrict to work right?

kzisme 10y ago
I can see some people being opposed to spending time outside of work - talking about tech/work stuff though. (I'm not included in this group).