Engineering Book Club - 6 Months Later

Six months ago, I, together with my friend Jose A Lobato decided to create an online community for people who enjoy reading and discussing engineering books with other professionals; I shared some of the motivations in this post.

After sharing on our social circles, we got around ten friends motivated by our idea. So I decided to share on HackerNews. I don't have much "Karma" in the platform, so I assumed I wouldn't get so much visibility. Spoiler alert, I was wrong.

The surprise was that people started complaining that you have to pay to be part of a community (actually, there are a lot of paid communities; it is not a concept that I have invented myself). At the same time, a lot of people also understood the pricing thing. So, it turns out to be an interesting debate about "paying or not paying" to be part of a community.

Some of the comments:

"You’re kidding right? Charging 50 euro for access to basically a Discord, Slack, etc. channel."

I can create a free Discord for this right now, and it'll cost me (and the people joining it) exactly 0€

Also, comments in the other direction:

Great, where's your discord link?

"I can create a free Discord?" But the reality is that you haven't.

The best book clubs I've been in are ones where the members had to pay something to be in it.

There are actual people working to curate the content, manage the community, etc. And as such, they charge an amount for the work they're doing. If you think the price does not meet the value, then you can... just not pay it.

I must admit that it was fun to see everyone talking about this.

Many other people were also giving exciting feedback about the website, the lack of information, and further details that made me go again to my website and update it to make it more straightforward. (Thanks to everyone who gave constructive feedback).

Six Months Later

Six months later, we are more than 50 professionals who enjoy reading and discussing engineering books together, and we have read six books.

Some of the coolest thing happens was that the author of one of the books (Database Internals), Alex Petrov, decided to join us, and it has been an incredible experience; reading the book with the author has been the most fun part of this journey.

We also had the opportunity to organize a coffee chat with John Ousterhout, the author of A Philosophy Of Software Design, a professor of Computer Science in Standford University. It was the first book we read and it was also interesting to see how he was looking forward to find arguments agains his ideas.

And in general, everyone in the community is really happy and engaged, they read more, they get more from books and the most important thing, we have fun together.

Key Learnings

I have learned a lot from this launch, but these are the most interesting points:

• Do not worry if not everyone shares your passion. They see the situation from another perspective. Try to learn from them, but do not get frustrated with their comments.

• Give thanks to everyone who hates your ideas; do not take them personally; the internet is a wild place where anonymous people do not take care about respect.

• Respect and be transparent with the people who join your idea.

• Enjoy the journey, my main goal is to enjoy reading books with other professionals.