Title: A paper reading club at work; databases and distributed systems research Author: Phil Eaton
Informally, I’m a part of two reading groups. One at work, one with old friends from college; both about architecture and systems.
“Weekly seemed way too often. A month seemed way too infrequent. Fortnightly seemed decent.”
This sounds right. Meeting once a week means reading at least one paper a week, which is too much to ask for as an extracurricular. Once a month can make sense in some contexts—my CMU reading group is monthly, while work is fortnightly.
“I picked a first one, the Redshift paper, to get us started. Demonstrating the process to avoid confusion. And I made a calendar invite for everyone in the channel, the paper linked in the invite.”
It doesn’t get any simpler than this. Low start up costs other than the intimidation.
“Once I had these first few folks interested I was able to post again in a broader company channel that a couple of us were starting this paper club. By the end of the day the dedicated channel was 29 folks.”
Honestly, this is the biggest takeaway I got from this post.
- The thing you want to start will grow a lot faster once it has started. People are more comfortable joining a thing that has “already started” (even if it has only existed for a day). It can be a little scary being one of the “first” to join.