New technology is exciting, but after being a Software Developer for a long time, I sometimes find it challenging to be enthusiastic about new tech. I’ve mostly sat on the Late Majority in the Technology adoption life cycle. SwiftUI is increasingly becoming the future of iOS development, and I felt the need to invest time learning it.
My friend, Sean Ho mentioned to me one day that his company runs a weekly bookclub on technical subjects. This conversation got me thinking and gave me an idea to see if learning SwiftUI can be a team activity rather than on my own, and a book club would help facilitate it.
The book
There are currently several excellent books on SwiftUI, and Thinking in SwiftUI was an ideal candidate for the book club because it went deep into the framework. The book also provided many exercises that I thought would be ideal to go through as a group.
Recipe
I found this article written by ZenDesk that provided a simple guideline for the book club.
Participants
I reached out to my immediate team to see who would be interested in participating in the book club. All the iOS developers within the group were willing to participate in the book club.
Format
I created a slack group for participants to share their insights on learning SwiftUI.
We allocated a specific time for the book club within the week that suits everyone.
Before each session, the group decided on a chapter lead.
The chapter lead is responsible for creating the session notes and driving the discussions during the session.
One of the book club members suggested using Xcode Playgrounds with Markup for session notes. This approach was great as it allowed to place live code examples with code.
The session notes were shared on a GitHub repository so that participants can follow along with the chapter lead during the session.
During the sessions, we found that it’s useful to keep things open-ended and facilitate discussions within the group. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that you are not doing a talk but a collaborative learning activity with the participants.
e.g
In the book it suggests to use
@Stateover here, how do we feel about this? Is there a better way?
TL;DR
I found the activity of learning a book together with a group of people very engaging. The people involved in the sessions found SwiftUI to be very cool, and we even choose to build our next feature within the App with it (More on this later).
Is there a technical book that you always found that you want to read but can’t find the motivation or time to do it, why not start a book club with your friends or colleagues?.