Starting a Future of Coding book club

We are starting a Future of Coding (FoC) book club! Anyone interested is quite welcome (tl;dr - join the FoC Slack community and find the #reading-together channel).

Future of Coding is a wonderful community of programmers, designers, researchers, etc.—really anyone interested in the history and future of computing. There’s a Slack channel, newsletter, and podcast, and there are meetups from time to time in London, SF, NYC, and other cities.

Slack is where we nominate and vote on books, schedule club meetings, and what not. As of today (Feb 11 ’24), we are still nominating and voting on our first book. The first meeting will likely be sometime in March or April.

Book recs

Recently I’ve been reading up on the history of programming and the Web in books like The Dream Machine, Hackers & Painters, Working in Public, and The Art of Doing Science and Engineering.

I wanted to start an FoC book club as a forum to discuss these books and also a way to find other great books in the genre (and make friends!). On that note, if you have book ideas please do lmk, or suggest a book directly on Slack.

Here’s my (growing) list:

• A Small Matter of Programming — Bonnie Nardi
• Mindstorms — Seymour Papert
• Weaving the Web — Tim Berners-Lee
• The Soul of a New Machine — Tracy Kidder
• The Children’s Machine — Seymour Papert