How can we make it better?

As a developer it’s easy to overlook details about the technologies we use. Time is limited and we can’t possibly know all details about everything we build our systems on.

And this doesn’t only apply to software development. Let me give you an example:

Have you ever felt like you didn’t know enough about a specific subject?

Have you ever acted on it, buying a book, just to find it several months later covered in dust, pages starting to yellow and still having no idea about what was written inside?

Or even worse, buying a book to discover it doesn’t cover everything you need to know?

That’s how our team was feeling. We wanted to know more, we were hungry for that knowledge, and a bit afraid to take the full commitment on our shoulders. We also wanted to share as much as we could with the rest of the team.

Therefore, we started a book club called postgres-connoisseurs. The rules were simple:

Each connoisseur would read a different book, one chapter for each session. Every other week we would meet up, talk about what we learnt and encourage conversation about the topics; anyone could just join and listen.

We thought that it was going to be a small group, but it soon started attracting more and more people.

Sometimes I wasn’t in the best mood to read the book, but knowing the meeting day was approaching, and knowing that Pericles was probably going to be better prepared than me, I pushed myself to finish the chapter.

It was overall an amazing experience. Those books were hard to follow, and even if it took us 4 months to go through all of the material, if it hadn’t been for the book club, I would have probably just read half of it. Most of what I know now about database optimisation is thanks to the connoisseurs group.

And obviously there are some extra reasons to have a learning book club: