Last year the dev team at NearSt started a "tech book club". We started meeting once a week to spend 30 to 45 minutes discussing a book, talk or podcast we thought was interesting and vaguely (or directly) relevant to our team's activities.

The below is an unordered list of the various resources we looked at in 2020. Some we liked, some we didn't. We definately didn't finish all the books either. However, they all provided great jumping off points for us to reflect on our team, roadmap, cultural attitudes and technical choices... and so forth.

We found this a particularly good activity since the start of the pandemic, bringing us together to exercise our minds and kick start team discussions whilst working remotely.

So, in case any of these spark your interest... here's our 2020 list!

• Clean Code by R.C. Martin
• RubyConf 2017: Keynote - You're Insufficiently Persuasive by Sandi Metz
• JavaScript the Good Parts
• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• "The creative power of misfits" with Adam Grant
• A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout
• I see your point, but... - Gleb Bahmutov on Testing and Cypress
• AWS re:Invent 2019:Amazon DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns (DAT403-R1) or 2018: Amazon DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns
• Tatiana Mac: “System of Systems” — Clarity 2019
• Rebel Thinking by Matthew Syed
• Testing Tradeoff Triangle by Paul Swail
• Debriefing Facilitation Guide by Etsy
• Fueling system discovery with observability | Charity Majors (Honeycomb)
• The Psychological Effects of UseEffect - Sara Vieira
• The Return of 'Write Less, Do More' by Rich Harris | JSCAMP 2019
• GOTO 2020 • Sustainable Software Engineering, Building Carbon-Efficient Applications • Asim Hussain
• How to detangle and understand production - Liz Fong-Jones