We kicked off 2018 with a brand new event format – a “Book Club” in which everyone brought in their favourite text and discussed it. This time round we focused on texts which “Changed Your Way Of Thinking”. It did not have to be a book explicitly – it could have been an article, podcast, blog, online course - anything really.
We have composed a list of worthy entries (as deemed by the January attendees) for anyone’s 2018 resolutions. The entries are as follows, in no particular order:
- Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love - Richard Sheridan ( Book )
- Java Posse (Podcast – no longer updated)
- The Pheonix Project – Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford (Book)
- Design of Everyday Things - David A. Norman (Book)
- Clean Architecture – Rober C. Martin (Book)
- Clean Code – Robert C. Martin (Book)
- A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It’s Everyone’s Business - Adam Morgan and Mark Barden (Book)
- The Introvert Advantage (How To Thrive In An Extrovert World) - Marti Olsen Lany (Book)
- Nonviolent Communication – A Language of Life (Nonviolent Communication Guides) - Marshall B. Rosenberg (Book)
- Freedom from Command and Control: A Better Way to Make the Work Work - John Seddon (Book)
- Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There - Rutger Bregman (Book)
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari (Book)
- fast.ai (Online Course)
- Do Elephants Have Souls? (Article)
- The Pragmatic Programmer - Andrew Hunt and David Thomas (Book)
- The Chimp Paradox: The Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness - Prof Steve Peters (Book)
- Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman (Book)
- 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know - Kevlin Henney (Book)
- The Mythical Man-month: Essays on Software Engineering - Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (Book)
- Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager - Michael Lopp (Book)
- Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood - Trevor Noah (Audiobook recommended)
- Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction Steve McConnell (Book)
- Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas R Hofstadter (Book)
- Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief -Jordan B. Peterson (Book)
- In the Midst of Life - Jennifer Worth (Book)
- The general topic of teaching machines ( a list of articles)
Some people were not able to make it on the day but they were kind enough to share their choices directly with us:
- Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values - Robert Pirsig (Book)
- Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Robert C. Martin Series)- Michael Feathers (Book)
- Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change - by Kent Beck (Book)
- Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams -Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister (Book)
- The Five Dysfunctions of a team - Patrick M. Lencioni (Book)
The format of the event worked well as everyone was encouraged to contribute to the conversation, and there was no pressure to read one particular book, but everyone brought something they were comfortable reading. There was a wide variety of topics, many of which were not directly code related which made the discussions even more interesting.