& Continuous Learning

Last year I coordinated a technical book club here at Source Allies. This was my first experience doing one and I wanted to share my experience for the benefit of others who may be looking at starting one.

The fact that we even started a book club was a big positive because it is one great way to geek out with very smart people. You get the opportunity to voice your opinion on a certain topic and hear counter-points or similar views that expand your own perspective.

We went through 2 books in the span of about 6 months. The first book was Test Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck. It's a very good book by itself. But we found it didn't make for very good book club discussion. The material didn't really provide much fodder for critical thinking and exploration in my opinion. But it was a start.

We then picked up Effective Java by Joshua Bloch as our second book. Java is currently my bread and butter and this book was very appropriate with it's tip based approach. The material was a little dense in some areas, but overall an extremely good book for a book club discussion because it provided enough room for critical thinking and discussion. Unfortunately though well intentioned I thought we fell off the wagon due to a few different reasons:

• We met in a cafeteria location which was noisy and had it's own share of distractions making it difficult to have any sustained discussion
• Not a whole lot of discussion around the topic because each of us read a different chapter in the book and we didn't really have common ground
• We had participants in the discussion who hadn't read the book and would understandably drive the conversations off topic
• We didn't have a standing meeting time which we were committed to. Sometimes I felt we were scrambling just to get a common meeting time organized. We did get better about this towards the later half of last year.

Going forward into 2010

Learning from last year, we are making some changes to derive more out of the book club this year.

• Meet in a quiet location - This year we will be meeting in a conference room with little distractions
• A once a week standing meeting - This way everyone in the group is aware of the weekly commitment and can be prepared
• Be more pro-active about our book selection - Maintain a list of potentially interesting books and select books at the regular meeting
• More structured discussion format - We all have views and opinions on what we've read. So all of us must have the opportunity to voice our thoughts
• Book review - This year we are going to attempt to publish a blog post reviewing each book that we discussed at the book club
• Limit the book club to a maximum of 6 members - any more and the 1-hour will be insufficient for everyone to participate fully

We've already had two meetings so far this year with the above format and I thought it went very well. And am looking forward to a more rewarding book club this year.