Sideproject: Pugmark - The online book club for developers.
Hi everyone!
A book club seems like something from the last century. You're meeting up with a group of people, who does that anyway nowadays? You've managed to read through the whole book in the month that you had to do that. Scribbling down some notes along the way, carefully highlighting sentences because they resonated with you. It's been a tedious and lonely process until now.
When you finally meet up, it gives you a feeling of belonging, knowing there are others who share your interests and passions. Finding out someone has also read your favorite book is a great conversation starter. Those conversations are more often than not full of new insights.
A year ago, I mentioned the idea of an online book club to my friend Raoul. We both like reading books as an educational tool. For me, starting to read books has been eye-opening. We often discussed the books we read with each other. Those were the times I discovered the point of the book, the bigger lesson it was trying to teach me.
Now, one year later, we think with pugmark we have built something that helps us in having that discussion. Having used it myself for a couple of books now, I notice how much more I remember of what I read. With pugmark, we want to give you a way to find those like-minded readers. It's the async, remote version of a book club.
We are curious to hear what you think about what we have created. Of course, we are here to answer any questions you have!
It's a pretty interesting idea. From experience, a lot of software books are designed to be read in small chunks, rather than from cover to cover as a novel might be for example.
Let's take Eloquent JavaScript for example. It can be used as a learning tool for a beginner, but also as a reference for specific concepts for a more experienced JS developer.
Do you know what proportion of developers reads their software-related books in that fashion?
That's very interesting to know indeed. From personal experience, many times I'm interested in a subset of the book and It's really hard to get an idea of how good that chunk is.
I tend to skip many chapters I know I'm not gonna make good use of it today. Even a chunk of a book is sometimes too much knowledge.
Really well done on the website design Maxi!
Thanks! It was all inspired by pugs. :D