[HN Gopher] I run a software book club
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I run a software book club
Author : ingve
Score : 208 points
Date : 2024-05-30 12:50 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (notes.eatonphil.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (notes.eatonphil.com)
| eatonphil wrote:
| Hello! Happy to take questions.
| sebg wrote:
| I'd love to see examples of the actual groups as well as the
| "Intro email"?
|
| Thanks! Really good read.
| eatonphil wrote:
| > the "Intro email"
|
| Basically a condensed version of this blog post. :)
| jackconsidine wrote:
| You got any in-person NYC clubs planned for this Summer?
| eatonphil wrote:
| I 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
|
| [1] https://eatonphil.com/nyc-systems-coffee-club.html
|
| [2] https://notes.ekzhang.com/events/nysrg
| jackconsidine wrote:
| Oh nice, I'll check out nyc systems. Thanks!
| bootsmann wrote:
| Tangentially related but what did you think about the second
| half of database internals?
| eatonphil wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Interesting, 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 wrote:
| Is there anything you did that, in hindsight, seemed a bit too
| heavy-handed?
| eatonphil wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| What was your process for starting the book club and gathering
| the first group of people to gather?
| eatonphil wrote:
| Mostly just posting on Twitter I think. LinkedIn, Discord,
| and my mailing list to a lesser degree.
| CollinEMac wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| My only recommendation is Designing Data Intensive
| Applications.
|
| I agree with you that most recommended books are so-so.
| yismail wrote:
| Is there any way to look over past discussions on the books?
| jayde2767 wrote:
| Hi,
|
| Just curious what the frequency of meetings you found to be most
| effective, weekly, bi-weekly etc?
|
| Thanks
| eatonphil wrote:
| In person I did biweekly (fortnightly) and that seemed like a
| fair frequency. Virtually though there's a new discussion
| started every week.
| NortySpock wrote:
| Just 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.
| leetrout wrote:
| Sometimes 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 wrote:
| Any Bay Area in-person ones anyone here would recommend?
| buttrpopcorn wrote:
| I'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.
| kassouni wrote:
| I'm also interested!
| better_sh wrote:
| same!
| rohit33 wrote:
| +1
| julianeon wrote:
| I don't think there is one since no one has responded yet. So
| you should start one.
| specialist wrote:
| Perfect. 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Interested to hear more about this. What works well? What
| didn't?
| mysto wrote:
| We 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 wrote:
| Sounds fun. How do you get your list of articles?
| mysto wrote:
| It's crowdsourced. People add to the list things they find
| interesting and would like discussed more widely. We also
| have round robin turns setup to decide who picks the next
| article to read from the pool.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Are you able to organize that on company time? Are you guys
| clocked in during your meetings?
|
| I guess that wouldn't be unreasonable if the content is work
| related and certainly helps with attendance, but I'm not sure
| if that would fly within all corporations.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Not OP, but I have worked at a few companies that would't
| mind, as long as the articles are relevant to your work.
| You could even sell it as a way to enrich everyone's
| expertise because of the deeper technical discussion.
| mysto wrote:
| Yeah. The company has a general culture of enabling
| learning, so this fits right in. The company also does a
| wider book club that focuses on more non-technical topics.
| ska wrote:
| > Are you able to organize that on company time? Are you
| guys clocked in during your meetings?
|
| I've approved or started (or both) this sort of thing on
| company time before, at more than one place.
|
| For context, this was typically early stage R&D, and
| many/most of the employees had some academic background,
| though that ranged from "decades ago" to "we just hired you
| after a masters degree".
|
| In this setting, it's a pretty natural continuation of the
| common "journal club" approach in academic research groups.
| It spreads the effort around, helps the team stay on top of
| new work, and generally improves professional development -
| if done well. It does take a bit of effort to keep fresh.
| jll29 wrote:
| I think most technology companies should have that, and
| I've been promoting that workplaces.
|
| The trick to make it sustainable is to make at 3-month
| calendar of covered papers from multiple sub-areas (e.g.
| data management to machine learning, new programming
| languages to compiler topics) and share that widely. Not
| every topic is relevant to everyone, so naturally each
| topics will only attract a subset of the crowd beyond a
| small number of open-minded champions, but that's okay.
| serial_dev wrote:
| (Not OP) We tried launching a book club at one of our
| previous companies, where we were told "no worries, take
| your time to read a chapter a week and take an hour to talk
| about it.
|
| While in theory, everybody thought it's a good idea, not
| everyone had time to read it, and when it came down to it,
| everybody just preferred to work on their regular tasks. In
| the end, nobody wants to risk delaying a promised deadline
| because of a book club.
|
| So it all fizzled out within a month...
| henrik_w wrote:
| I ran a book club for 7 years when I worked at TriOptima. We
| were maybe 40 developers in total at the company, and around 10
| would join when we picked a new book. Towards the end of one
| book, some people would always drop off, but there were still
| enough people to make it useful.
|
| One of the key (unexpexted) benefits of it was how it
| facilitated discussions about SW development practices between
| the different teams at the company. The content was usually
| good for giving us new ideas to try etc, but the usefullness of
| the discussions surprised me.
|
| I've written more about it here:
|
| https://henrikwarne.com/2016/11/08/developer-book-club/
| magicalhippo wrote:
| And 5) get something out of reading software books.
|
| Not sure what it is, but in general software books just don't
| do much for me.
|
| Only one I truly liked and got a lot out of was Physically
| Based Rendering[1]. It had a great blend of explaining the
| concepts but also showing how to implement them, and for me the
| literal programming style worked very well in this case.
|
| But apart from that I struggle with getting something out of
| software books. Not fiction though, I read tons of sci-fi
| (especially hard) in my 20s.
|
| [1]: https://www.pbrt.org/
| g9yuayon wrote:
| My experience as well. I tried it a couple of times more than
| 10 years ago, one is covering Nancy Lynch's Distributed
| Algorithms, and one is Maurice Herlihy's The Art of
| Multiprocessor Programming. We finished about 1/4 of each of
| the books before running out of momentum. People simply lost
| interest as the content became increasingly challenging. We
| talked about the reasons, and the overwhelming feedback was
| that people lost interest because they failed to see what they
| learned could be applied to the job in short term, so it looked
| to them that the effort of learning the hard stuff wouldn't pay
| off.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| what reader do you use?
| senkora wrote:
| I currently use this one for iOS which handles both epub
| and pdf pretty well: 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://develope
| r.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/speec...
| zeroCalories wrote:
| I do listen to audio books, but I don't like them for
| technical books. Screen readers usually do a poor job of
| handling code and diagrams that are crucial for understanding
| something. I like talks and lectures though, but with those I
| suffer from a similar issue to reading alone.
| senkora wrote:
| > Screen readers usually do a poor job of handling code and
| diagrams that are crucial for understanding something.
|
| That's fair. This is definitely the main reason why my
| comprehension is lower and I have no solution for it.
| senkora wrote:
| Here'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.h...
| eatonphil wrote:
| Yes I'll keep adding people until at least this weekend when
| the first chapter discussion starts.
| sam1r wrote:
| >> 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 wrote:
| A 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
|
| Here are some posts and content pertaining to these book clubs:
| 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 wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| Most 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/ 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
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| A book club for Introduction to Analytic Number Theory and How
| to Use Emacs. I guess I'm not as nerdy as I once thought!
| pants2 wrote:
| Ha, 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.
| forgot-im-old wrote:
| After 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.
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