mysto

Yeah. The company has a general culture of enabling learning, so this fits right in. The company also does a wider book club that focuses on more non-technical topics.

It’s crowdsourced. People add to the list things they find interesting and would like discussed more widely. We also have round robin turns setup to decide who picks the next article to read from the pool.

We tried different models. One book every two months, one or more chapters of a book every month (thus finishing a whole book over a few months), and one article/video (generally requiring an hour of reading/watching time) every two weeks. My thoughts below are based on experience of those three models.

1. Reading a whole book every one or two months works well when everyone has a regular reading habit. Without that people realize that they need to read a whole book in a few days before the meeting. That either led to poor quality discussions or people showing up without reading. 2. Reading book chapters every month was less demanding but the frequency of meetings was still too low for people to build reading into their routines. 3. At two weeks the frequency was high enough that it became a routine for the engineers. 4. We also reminded everyone one day before to read the article. Even if they had forgotten to read till then it is easy to find and hour in the day to read up. 5. If the reminder was too far in advance (say 3 days before) then people ignored the reminder.

This has been my experience too. However, I found that changing the book club to “article club” where we all read one interesting technical article worked quite well. I have been running such a club with fortnightly meetings for over 3 years now.

There’s another interesting dimension to it especially in the context of getting feedback from people you regularly interact in life. Regardless of whether the particular feedback was helpful appreciating it as a gift encourages the person to give feedback in the future. This ensures that you continue to get feedback from the person in the future some of which may be very valuable.

  Location: London
  Remote: No
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, Django, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Tastypie, Celery, AngularJS, Bootstrap.
  Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ta2a35dthu11bih/zahir_koradia_cv.pdf?dl=0
  Email: zahir[dot]koradia[at]gmail[dot]com

About 7 years of startup experience across two companies. Have architected systems for both the companies and have both frontend and backend development experience. Also have experience in defining tech processes, building tech teams, and UX design.