A tech book club provides motive to read a book all the way through with help and encouragement from fellow readers. Giving a deeper understanding and overall better rates of finished and learnt from books.
Developers are always striving to learn more and improve. Unfortunately finding the time to do so can sometimes be difficult. Thankfully a book club can help with this issue. Discussing what we’ve read with others can help us derive more information from it’s content; making it a more worthwhile investment of time and effort. And having a group at work all reading the same book is a great way to keep everyone encourage to reading every week.
As a group of software developers we self-organized and formed this great work book club that had us reading books like Test-Driven Development, Design Patterns, Clean Code, and also created discussions about tech blog posts.
Why did we want a bookclub
Many of the developers in our office wanted mentorship or paths of improvement that they could work on to better themselves and grow their abilities. The best resource for this is usually your senior employees, but like many tech offices there can be a struggle to find those great seniors.
Roll for initiative
I’ve been in more than a few conversations with other developers who want to get things done. They have a can-do attitude, but are blocked on a “wish I could” mindset.
They usually sound something like this:
“I’ve heard of TDD, but don’t know how it works, or if it would work with how we do things here.”
“It would be nice to have a better idea of the different design patterns used in the industry around us.”
“Some of our codebase is so hard to maintain, I don’t know how to even approach the problem.”
“I’m not sure if we have enough testing, it sure feels like we don’t”
It’s clear that the developers above have an idea as to what they want to do, but don’t feel like they have the tools to do it.
At this point there’s really 3 options to take:
- Get the information, tools, and skills externally (hiring, consulting, seminars)
- Bring and share the information, tools, and skills within the company (P2P, book club, Lunch and Learns)
- Look into these issues questions on your own; read books (Just for yourself)
Seeing as how the first option has dependencies on mostly external resources we decided to tackle this by hosting an office book club.
Driving that initiative
Unfortunately for change leaders, the hardest part of shifting mindsets and advancement is not coming up with the ideas, but continuing to pull on them. I’m in no way an expert on how to encourage self development and there’s lots of well written resources out there for reading on personal growth.
What I’ve found that makes self-initiatives successful is the support from 2 types of people
- Those with a passion for the topic who wants to lead the charge
- A supportive team that cares about the subject
Members are not fixed to a specific role and may change as time goes by.
Leveraging the drive of those who are passionate will help keep a book club afloat.
As a person with that passion who was willing to kick it off, but someone who wanted to support a team, I wanted to ensure we had a setup that engaged everyone. We did this by trying to keep our book club meetings seemingly close to a daily/retrospective, keeping the sessions lean and iterative.
Overall the experience was having a weekly 30m round table with 5m blocked at the end for a vote on what’s to be read for next week. During this time someone drives a note section on their computer listing topics, outcomes which are used often as possible action items similar to a Retro.
What do teams get out of a book club
I’ve said it before, and I’m going to keep saying it, Development opportunity!
Slowing down to speed up, taking time to sharpen your axe. Developers learn while doing work, but it has been shown that stopping and taking time to reflect can yield significant benefits. Just look at any blog post about a team that started doing retros or post-mortems as part of their development cycle.
Reading technical or programming methodology books gave members chances to try to test (prove/disprove) alternatives methods of development and tackling problems.
I.e. After reading Test Driven Development (TDD) I updated my behavior while writing code; building a test case before or during building an interface.
Builds communication and promote teamwork
By fostering an environment of open communication and stimulating it with a common source material you create pathways for developers to talk about relevant problems.
Using the subject of the book and contrasting it to the work that you’re doing each day is a great way for developers to think differently about their current situation.
I.e. Clean code has a section about growing environments and used an analogy for code about the differences of building a city vs a town which my team used while scoping projections and estimating feature complexity
Practice leadership roles
Gives members the opportunity to step up and practice leading a group discussion or presenting topics to other teams, have members talk about the book as a whole in an engineering presentation space or any sort of coaching that can be done to have a knowledge transfer session
Make our offices learning centers
Hosting weekly book club sessions gives an open space for developers to share their thoughts. More senior devs can talk to their past experiences. While the junior devs are put onto a level ground where they can ask questions and make recommendations.
Reading technical books gives a great medium for people to get better at talking abstract coding practices with each other.
For tips on the steps and possible logistics to get a book club in your workplace check out : How to setup a book club
Ethan’s book club recommendations:
| Technical | |
| The Pragmatic Programmer | A modern software developers axe sharpener |
| Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software | A lot (and I mean a lot) of information on software design patterns, a tad dry |
| Test-Driven Development By Example | Writing code in a backwards way so you only have to do it once. |
| Historical / Novels | |
| The Innovators By Walter Isaacson | The story of the people who created the computer and the Internet |
| Countdown to ZERO DAY By Kim Zetter | The world’s first digital weapon. Stuxnet |
| The Phoenix project | A Dev/Ops manual told through a first person narrative |
Conclusion
A development book club is a simple to maintain activity that is relatively cheap to start and gives members self driven improvement techniques. This club engages members and creates a positive learning experience.
