The DevOps Book Club
Polar Squad library. Note the table hockey.
We started a book club. Every Friday at 1 PM, a bunch of us at Polar Squad gather to discuss a book. It has been great, and I’m going to tell you why you should consider starting a book club at work.
Fundamentally, the Book Club is about making tech work meaningful – we study to be able to give advice and help our customers more broadly. It also aims to make work more meaningful for us consultants by giving us tools to have a bigger impact and work on things we identify as most valuable.
The Club also serves as training for the projects we do. It gives us tools that we can use to improve our project work. We’ve read about DevOps practices – this is the DevOps Book Club, after all. However, we’ve also read about how to drive change, improve culture, avoid local optimization to improve actual outcomes, and many other topics. The idea is to go beyond technical issues and into things like transformative leadership and other valuable skills for a consultant. In the end, this is what DevOps is all about, too.
We cover one chapter of the book we are currently reading in each session. We take turns preparing questions beforehand that connect what we’ve been reading to our work as consultants.
Topics from all corners of DevOps
The first book we read in the Club was the DevOps Handbook. It’s a practical overview of all the various DevOps practices to implement – great reading if you want to make software development less stressful and more effective. Many of the topics were already familiar ground to our seasoned DevOps consultants, but reading it in book form helped crystallize the ideas. Our Friday discussions helped us dig deeper into the book’s ideas and discuss their applications in our daily work. Since we all already had a lot of experience with the book’s practices, it was insightful to hear others’ viewpoints on the practices described in the book and real-life examples of how they’ve applied them to their work.
Since the first book, we’ve also branched out to more general topics. We read “Sooner Safer Happier” by Jon Smart to understand how to drive organizational change that leads to better outcomes instead of being counterproductive. Next, we’ll be reading “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard” to give us tools to create lasting change.
Going beyond technical topics is also helpful for implementing technological changes. Consider the following scenario DevOps consultants often run into: our customer might need a specific technical implementation. A Kubernetes cluster, for example. A consultant comes and sets up a Kubernetes cluster. Six months later, development teams haven’t actually started using the cluster, and it sits mostly idle except for some test workloads. The technical challenge has been solved, but people’s habits and behaviors haven’t been changed. At its heart, this is a people and culture issue and needs to be solved accordingly.
Books inspire discussion and a sense of community
We’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about the human side of change in the Book Club. We’ve found insights about how to ensure the technology changes we make will stick. We’ve gained tools to make it more likely that our efforts are meaningful and, in turn, the customer’s work also becomes more meaningful.
Besides helping with customer projects, reading books together also helps with creating a sense of community. We spend most of our time as consultants in customer projects where we don’t necessarily interact with other consultants from Polar Squad constantly. Learning together is an excellent way to connect with our colleagues as well. For me, the discussions in the Club have been one of the highlights of the week, and I look forward to them every time.
Risto Laurikainen is a DevOps Consultant with a decade of experience in building cloud computing platforms.