Software Engineering is a rapidly evolving field. Without intentionally investing time in learning, it can be tough to keep up with trends or expand your skillset beyond what your day-to-day work calls for. Running a book club is a low effort high return-on-investment activity that will help a team level up, identify new ways of doing things, and strengthen bonds.
There’s a common joke amongst JavaScript engineers that you can take any verb, add “.js” to the end of it, and find a new library or framework. For fun, I just tried this with “jump js“, “dance js“, and “swim js“.. and sure enough each existed!
Book clubs support continued learning and strengthen team bonds
Engineers are craftspeople at heart. We love improving our skills, and book clubs are one way that we can do that. They also create additional time for the team to bond over mutually interesting topics.
I look forward to our book club not just because I typically learn something new, but also because I get to spend some more time with the team in a context that isn’t strictly all about the business.
How I run an engineering book club
- Meet weekly for 30mins
- For our team, because we chose to consume shorter-form content, 30mins seems to be enough time to cover everything
- All forms of content are accepted: chapters from a book, technical blog posts, lectures, software conference talks, podcasts, etc
- At the beginning of the meeting ask everybody who consumed the content what topics / ideas / sections stood out to them and what they’d like to dig into more deeply with the group
- Dig into each highlighted topic
- Ask for volunteers / elect somebody to pick the piece of content for the next week
It’s as simple as that! Our group ranges from ~4-7 people each week and includes a variety of people including engineers, managers, and even folks outside of engineering.