Announcing the Silicon Valley Tech Reading Group

TL;DR: I’ve just started a tech reading group on Meetup: Silicon Valley Tech Reading Group
We meet Tuesdays from 7-9pm Pacific Time.

Back around the turn of the 21st Century there was an amazing group that met every Tuesday night at Hobee’s in Cupertino. Led by Russ Rufer, the Silicon Valley Patterns Group started by reading the “Gang of Four” Design Patterns book, but soon branched out to reading about other software design patterns and eventually process patterns.

It’s in that group that I first heard of of Extreme Programming and, later, agile software development. Indeed if you look in the acknowledgments from Alistair Cockburn’s book Agile Software Development, you find a special thanks to the group for reviewing the book when it was still in draft form.

After more than a decade, the group drifted apart, and there wasn’t any equivalent group for a long time. Until now.

As one of my New Year’s resolutions, this year I formed the Silicon Valley Tech Reading Group on Meetup.com. We meet online every Tuesday night from 7-9 Pacific Time.

My goal is to create reading group like the one Russ created a quarter century ago. Like the Silicon Valley Patterns Group, we use the reading group patterns from Joshua Kerievsky’s paper “Pools of Insight” (aka Knowledge Hydrants). That is, we use the book as a jumping off point for everybody in the group to share their own experience on the topic.

At I write this, we’ll be finishing up our study of The Lean Startup this coming Tuesday, and then starting in on the 20th Anniversary Edition of The Pragmatic Programmer the following Tuesday.

I hope you can join us.