Reading Tech Books Together

Do you have tech books sitting on your shelf unread? Join the free book club and read books together!

See Join Us below for how to join the book club.

Current Book

The book we’re currently reading together is Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition by Martin Kleppmann and Chris Riccomini.

If you’re not already a Book Club member, join us in the discord Book Club channel.

Schedule

We meet for book discussion and watching together for 2 hours on Sundays starting at 18:00 UTC (10am PT, 1pm ET), taking a 7-minute break around the 1-hour mark.

🔜 Chapter 4 (2026-03-01)

We’ll start digging into the deeper material in Chapter 4 (Storage & Retrieval). I’m looking forward to getting a better understanding of how databases store data, especially logs and trees.

✅ Rest of Chapter 3 (2026-02-22)

We finished the rest of Chapter 3 (Data Models and Query Languages). It was interesting to learn more detail about “star” schemas as well as Cypher, the graph database query language (not to be confused with graphQL, which we also read about).

✅ Chapter 2 and part of Chapter 3 (2026-02-15)

Nonfunctional requirements isn’t the best term, but it’s important to understand how to measure whether your system is serving the users well. This chapter defined the terms that should be used when measuring performance or talking about reliability and resiliency.

✅ Chapter 1: Trade-offs in Data Systems Architecture (2026-02-08)

There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.

Our kickoff session was short, but sweet, where we discussed Chapter 1 of the book.

About

For over 5 years, I’ve led our community “Book Club” in reading, studying, and discussing various technical books. Since then, we’ve gotten together for a couple of hours (remotely over Zoom) almost every week to discuss a chapter (or sometimes two) of a technical book. Here’s a list of books that we’ve read so far:

• TDD by Example (Beck)
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Feathers)
• Domain-Driven Design (Evans)
• Implementing DDD (Vaughn)
• Object Design (Wirfs-Brock, McKean)
• Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns (Khorikov)
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (GoF)
• Patterns of Software Architecture (we did a bunch from various POSA volumes)
• Learning Domain Driven Design (Khononov)
• The Programmer’s Brain (Hermans)
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Fowler)
• Balancing Coupling in Software Design (Khononov)

Watch Tech Talks Together

In addition to discussing books, we also watch technical talks together once a month as we read the book.

Join Us

The Book Club is open to everyone, and there’s no pressure to show up at every session. Event if you haven’t read all the material, join the Zoom anyway! It’s never too late to join: read and join the live discussion as you can.

If you want to participate, join the Discord if you’re not already a member. Then: send a Direct Message to @JitterTed indicating that you want to join the book club. Please provide your full name so that I can make sure you’re a real person.