I’m leading a book club at my workplace, Flywheel . We are working through “The Pragmatic Programmer From Journeyman to Master” by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. Published in 1999 this books walks through techniques and tips to level up your development. Even being published more than 20 years ago (😱) there are plenty of parts that are relevant and useful today. Certainly we have also ran into items that aren’t quite as useful now (I’m looking at you suggested Source Control Systems for ClearCase and Visual SourceSafe).
This was also a book that Dev Empathy Book Club ran through not too long ago. If you are looking for an online book club specifically for developers, I highly suggest checking it out. Ariel Caplan lead the group, and provided thoughtful discussion questions. With my own book club, I used these questions (with permission from Ariel of course!) as a starting place for our discussions too.
Each week, we meet over lunch and discuss the current chapter. So fare the cadence has been one chapter per week. One thing I have struggled a bit with is keeping the group engaged. Attendance has dropped, and not everyone has read the chapter. Any suggestions for drumming up more excitement? Anyone else have experience with trying to run a technical book club?