Running a book club in PostCo

This article will be about our learnings running a tech book club in PostCo for the past 3 months.

Our motivation
We want to try to cultivate a strong learning culture in PostCo, book clubs are a fast way to encourage cross learning and healthy discussion among team members. We decided to start with a book that is simple enough and is on everybody’s reading list, Pragmatic Programmer by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt.

Running the book club

1. Setup a recurring calendar invite
2. A Github wiki to keep track of the discussions.
3. Inform ahead to the participants which chapter will be in discussion.
4. We encourage everyone to go through the chapters, so that everyone is in line with the topics that will be discussed in the book club sessions. This allows conversation and discussion to flow more smoothly.

Learnings:

1. We would encourage active participation by encouraging questions in the middle of the session.
2. Create a page, in which participants can propose new books for the book club.
3. One person leading the talk normally does not work, participants will rely too much on the lead to delivery book’s content rather than reading the content themselves.
4. Active participation, where participants should bring up topics they found interesting in the chapter.
5. Generate follow-up discussion in Slack channel participants can post interesting blogs, videos, papars that related to the day.

Some of the books which are currently in our list.

1. Seven Databases in Seven weeks
2. 99 Bottles by Sandi Metz
3. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
4. Design patterns in Ruby

Conclusion
Book clubs are a great way to level up your team, and encourage healthy discussion between members.