How do you bookclub?

We would love to hear your thoughts on what you do to share knowledge with your team.

Here at LoadUp we had our first developer book club today. First of all this isn't just a bookclub, but an avenue for us to [pod, parking lot, table, hold off on talking about an interesting topic until an assigned time during the week to discuss in depth] any kind of knowledge that we think will benefit the team, or is worth exploring in depth.

Here is how we currently run our 'book club'

1. You don't talk about bookclub
2. You get a week to read the book chapter
3. Anyone can add other knowledge avenues they would like to share and they will be discussed in a FIFO manner
4. We try to ask two questions: 1. How does that differ from what we do now? 2. What could we use?
5. Most importantly no topic is off the table - radical ideas change the world.

Like all things that are new we started with an idea and came out the other side with something different. Next week we may end up changing how we do this because this thought experiment will evolve.

Why is this important to us?

As a growing team we will be constantly in the storming, forming, norming, and hopefully performing stages of team dynamics. These discussions will help our tribe through each of these constant evolutionary stages as we grow as a company.

Not only will this help our culture it will help our developers to push the boundaries of their comfort zones by learning new things, learning to speak their mind, and navigate passionate discourse. We never should stop learning, but we stop learning when things aren't interesting anymore.

I leave you with this tidbit of random knowledge that came into our conversation today courtesy of @jamessral

Code is a translation of what people do into machine language. It is perfectly legitimate to go the other direction. Shapeup is like an interface that we can interact with, but how we implement is up to us.