
Developer Book Club - turingbook
https://henrikwarne.com/2016/11/08/developer-book-club/
======
cableshaft
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.

------
Cpoll
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
> 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.

------
snug
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...](https://www.nginx.com/blog/building-microservices-free-ebook-
oreilly-nginx/)

------
Jtsummers
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.

------
techman9
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.

------
tbirrell
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.

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

~~~
kzisme
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).

