5 ms·
I run a software book club
- eatonphil 2y agoHello! Happy to take questions.
- sebg 2y agoI'd love to see examples of the actual groups as well as the "Intro email"? Thanks! Really good read.
- eatonphil 2y ago> the "Intro email" Basically a condensed version of this blog post. :)
- jackconsidine 2y agoYou got any in-person NYC clubs planned for this Summer?
- eatonphil 2y agoI want to but I also got stressed out considering it because of other stuff ([0, 1]) going on. In the meantime you can come to NYC Systems [0] or the NYC Systems Coffee Club [1]! There's also Eric Zhang's NYC paper reading group [2] that seems cool but I've never been to. [0] https://nycsystems.xyz https://nycsystems.xyz [1] https://eatonphil.com/nyc-systems-coffee-club.html https://eatonphil.com/nyc-systems-coffee-club.html [2] https://notes.ekzhang.com/events/nysrg https://notes.ekzhang.com/events/nysrg
- jackconsidine 2y agoOh nice, I'll check out nyc systems. Thanks!
- bootsmann 2y agoTangentially related but what did you think about the second half of database internals?
- eatonphil 2y agoI thought the second half was better than the first half! Alex Petrov was in the reading group that time. Funnily, if I recall correctly, he felt the first half was better, in part, because he wrote it last with more experience. It's a good book though.
- bootsmann 2y agoInteresting, I put the book down at the second half because I felt it went from extremely strong to somewhat weak. If he wrote the first part last then it makes a lot more sense. Might pick it up again after this. Completely worth it for the first part already tho.
- loughnane 2y agoIs there anything you did that, in hindsight, seemed a bit too heavy-handed?
- eatonphil 2y agoI have been lucky in not needing to moderate basically anything. I thought I'd have to do some moderation. So, luckily, no I don't think so.
- otras 2y agoWhat was your process for starting the book club and gathering the first group of people to gather?
- eatonphil 2y agoMostly just posting on Twitter I think. LinkedIn, Discord, and my mailing list to a lesser degree.
- CollinEMac 2y agoWhat are your software book recommendations in general? I often find that the material in the classics (programmatic programmer, mythical man-month, etc.) are so ubiquitous that I don't get much from actually reading them.
- eatonphil 2y agoMy only recommendation is Designing Data Intensive Applications. I agree with you that most recommended books are so-so.
- yismail 2y agoIs there any way to look over past discussions on the books?
- jayde2767 2y agoHi, Just curious what the frequency of meetings you found to be most effective, weekly, bi-weekly etc? Thanks
- eatonphil 2y agoIn person I did biweekly (fortnightly) and that seemed like a fair frequency. Virtually though there's a new discussion started every week.
- NortySpock 2y agoJust finished attending a weekly book club (Fundamentals of Software Architecture by Mark Richards and Neal Ford -- great book for mid and senior developers, as well as new architects). 2 chapters weekly worked well because the chapters were short, and were mostly brief overviews that discussed the pros and cons. (Also we had a ton of experience in the room, so that helped guide the discussion.) If the chapters were dense I would have longer gaps between meetings to allow people more time to read and reflect.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- leetrout 2y agoSometimes I lead book clubs that are purposefully short and low commitment. Especially for a book I know well I will pick a subset of chapters, (machete order, if you will) and run through them. I like to think it makes people curious enough to seek more on their own and my anecdata supports that. Related, I have had mixed experiences with work book clubs. I generally like them as an outlet for my socialization needs. Sometimes you get people seeking "brownie points" and they don't really participate. Sometimes you get the contrarian who thinks they know better than the author and does not debate the topic(s) in good faith. Sometimes you get eager people and have great discussion. All that said, I think book clubs are very useful and valuable and generally have zero issue getting the time allotted at work for folks across org boundaries to participate.
- julianeon 2y agoAny Bay Area in-person ones anyone here would recommend?
- buttrpopcorn 2y agoI'd love to attend one in the bay. Seems like a prime crowd to target for this. Please let me know if you find any. Happy to help start one too.
- julianeon 2y agoI'm in SF but I'd be willing to meet in SJ for a book club. Email me at julian@excelsitor.com if you want to help start this. Replying to others who said yes too.
- kassouni 2y agoI’m also interested!
- specialist 2y agoPerfect. Great summary. Yes and: our study group use(d) approval voting to choose the next topic(s). With both suggestions and voting open to any one. After closing nominations and before voting, we briefly chatted about each suggestion. No more than 15min, usually a lot less. Topics (books, papers, libraries, whatever) were added to the queue, ordered by interest (votes). The organizer calls another "election" as needed. To refill the queue, or if interest wanes, or if a book proves to be a stinker, or...
- justin_oaks 2y ago> Doing it at your company likely won't go well This has been my experience. I led a book club at one of my jobs and it was poorly attended and those who did attend hadn't read the book. My guess is that there is just a low percentage of people who meet all the criteria: 1) interested, 2) have the time to read the book, 3) have the commitment to read the book, and 4) social enough to attend the book club meeting. I understand that many people are busy and may not have time to read the book or have a schedule conflict the day the book club meeting happens. So unless your company is huge, you'll not have enough to keep a book club going. There also may be pressure to avoid using company communication tools to promote the club.
- mysto 2y agoThis has been my experience too. However, I found that changing the book club to “article club” where we all read one interesting technical article worked quite well. I have been running such a club with fortnightly meetings for over 3 years now.
- islewis 2y agoInterested to hear more about this. What works well? What didn't?
- mysto 2y agoWe tried different models. One book every two months, one or more chapters of a book every month (thus finishing a whole book over a few months), and one article/video (generally requiring an hour of reading/watching time) every two weeks. My thoughts below are based on experience of those three models. 1. Reading a whole book every one or two months works well when everyone has a regular reading habit. Without that people realize that they need to read a whole book in a few days before the meeting. That either led to poor quality discussions or people showing up without reading. 2. Reading book chapters every month was less demanding but the frequency of meetings was still too low for people to build reading into their routines. 3. At two weeks the frequency was high enough that it became a routine for the engineers. 4. We also reminded everyone one day before to read the article. Even if they had forgotten to read till then it is easy to find and hour in the day to read up. 5. If the reminder was too far in advance (say 3 days before) then people ignored the reminder.
- zeroCalories 2y agoI'm envious of your success. I'm convinced that reading dense technical books is crucial to developing yourself over time, but I have a hard time reading technical books alone. The few times I've been in a book club they started out great, but fizzled out in a couple of months. Maybe I'll look into it again.
- senkora 2y agoThis is unrelated to the book club topic, but have you considered reading dense technical books as audio books? I often do this and I find that I absorb them maybe 50% as well as if I sit down and read them, but that I read 500% more. As a result, I can re-read them a few times and still come out ahead. (rather than actually getting an audio book version, I'll typically get the epub and use a third-party reader with a read-aloud feature. I mention this because audio books are often not available, and because first-party readers typically won't allow you to read books aloud specifically because they to upsell you on the audiobook)
- chrisweekly 2y agowhat reader do you use?
- senkora 2y agoI currently use this one for iOS which handles both epub and pdf pretty well: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/voice-aloud-reader/id1446876360 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/voice-aloud-reader/id144687636... I've switched a few times, and anything on an Apple platform will typically just use the speech synthesis APIs and have the same set of voices available: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/speech_synthesis/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/speec...
- chrisweekly 2y agothanks!
- 2y ago
- senkora 2y agoHere's the page about his current book club. There's a Google Form link to sign up, which hopefully I'm not too late for since I just filled it out! https://eatonphil.com/2024-understanding-software-dynamics.html https://eatonphil.com/2024-understanding-software-dynamics.h...
- eatonphil 2y agoYes I'll keep adding people until at least this weekend when the first chapter discussion starts.
- sam1r 2y ago>> And email is built around an inbox. More so a traditional mailbox. I wish read receipts never existed. It doesn’t make sense to know when I check my mailbox.
- susam 2y agoA fellow book club host here! I too have run two book clubs over Jitsi and IRC. The first one was for Introduction to Analytic Number Theory (Apostol, 1976) and the second one was for Mastering Emacs (Petersen, 2022). Here are the meeting logs and some statistics: https://susam.net/cc/log.html https://susam.net/cc/log.html Here are some posts and content pertaining to these book clubs: https://susam.net/tag/meetup.html https://susam.net/tag/meetup.html Quite similar to the original post (OP), we also had about 5-8 regular participants in our meetups. However, ours were virtual rather than in-person. Given that the author of the OP mentions 5-8 consistent attendees at in-person meetups, it's quite impressive!
- tux3 2y agoThat number theory book looks like something I'd really enjoy reading. I assume you must have enjoyed the experience, but I'm curious how easy it is for everyone to move at the same pace on such a technical topic, where everyone might have a different background? Do you feel like the pace is ever an issue with technical book clubs, or is it actually just fine?
- susam 2y agoMost members of the analytic number theory book club were computer programmers in one form or another. A few among them had very strong background in mathematics, especially in elementary number theory and complex analysis. But nobody had any prior knowledge of analytic number theory. The pace was not an issue for me because we used to go really slow. We read every line of the book together, ensuring we understood each argument before moving to the next one. As the meeting host, I came prepared for the meetings and spent a lot of time illustrating proofs with additional details, perspectives, and examples (see https://offbeat.cc/iant/boards/ https://offbeat.cc/iant/boards/ for notes). This approach suited me well, as I need time to digest new mathematical concepts and form intuition around them. I hope it worked for others, but we didn't survey participants, so I can't say for sure. Sometimes we picked some exercise problems, solved them, and walked through the solutions during the meetings. But most exercises were done offline by the participants in their own time. I have written a lot more about the learning experience here: https://susam.net/one-hundred-meetings.html https://susam.net/one-hundred-meetings.html
- pants2 2y agoHa, from the title I assumed the group would try out a different piece of software every month (new database, library, programming language etc) and come back to discuss it as a group. Honestly that sounds more fun.
- eichin 2y agoooh, you could probably do one of these solely on organizer apps (a friend once joked about a subscription-based organizer service where what you got from the subscription was an entirely new app every other month or so :-)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- forgot-im-old 2y agoAfter COVID, I had an epiphany. Or maybe it was just caffeine deprivation. I thought, "Why not start a book club?" Now, the first challenge was finding fellow enthusiasts among my software engineering colleagues, who seemed to communicate exclusively in binary. During our daily stand-up, I announced, "Who here likes books?" I was met with a silence so profound that I could hear the hum of the office air conditioner. Undeterred, I added, "There will be snacks." This got their attention. After all, the way to a programmer's heart is through their stomach. By the end of the day, I had three tentative members: Jake, who only read sci-fi, Priya, who was into self-help books, and Alex, who claimed to enjoy "anything as long as it isn't too long." For our first meeting, I chose a conference room and sent out an email titled "Book Club Kickoff - Bring Your Appetite!" I brought in a selection of snacks: chips, cookies, and, because I was feeling fancy, a cheese platter. The turnout was surprisingly good. Even people who hadn't signed up showed up, lured by the smell of free food. We decided to read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, which seemed to be a safe middle ground between sci-fi and humor.
- littlekey 2y agoDelightful! But now I have to know, did it work? As in, did people actually read and discuss the book, and is the club still going?
- throwup238 2y agoIt was clearly a cannibalistic trap. The book readers were the snack.
- Gooblebrai 2y agoThis is the true question
- rufus_foreman 2y ago>> There will be snacks Wise move. More people will come if they think you have punch and pie.
- beryilma 2y agoIt must be a company culture thing. I've run book clubs on AI, C++, Code Complete, Timeseries Analysis, and research articles at my company with consistency attendance of 10-15 developers. I even had rotating facilitators and light homeworks where attendees did a decent job. However, the company's support is very important. Fortunately, my employer pays for the books and they even have a person charged with supporting book clubs, including ordering books for you and create a Confluence template for notetaking and attendance tracking.
- noisy_boy 2y agoMaybe there should be a software applications club. Choose a different piece of software to discuss each time and what's everyone's experience/pain-points with it and sharing tips/tricks/ideas about it.
- marcus_holmes 2y agoI thought this would be about installing a piece of software each month and evaluating it together. Which sounds awesome. Maybe I should go start that.
- juangacovas 2y agoThose comments are nice to read. I tried, but my coworkers are too "young" or from other generation, I guess. The response [about simply buying a book] was "Oh, another person said it wasn't needed [to buy a book about that] since it will always be behind newer versions coming"...
- eatonphil 2y agoA bunch of the people in my groups have been college students fwiw. It's been a complete mix of young people and experienced people. Doing it over the internet helps you cast the wide net. When you do it with only your direct friends or coworkers it can be much tougher, or hit or miss.