mohitk05

I co-run a similar group at my company (added a comment above), what has worked for us and we realised this early on: not everyone will have the time to read and hence the sessions need to have a driver/lead. Assigning reading does not work unfortunately as many attend such groups voluntarily in addition to their primary work.

We as organisers (better to have at least 2) prepared before hand, either a presentation or a document, and then presented it in the group. While doing this, the group is free to discuss and interrupt at any time (we chose a slighly informal venue in the office).

Gradually, after about 10 sessions, we started seeing voluntary interest from the attendees to present a paper. And honestly this was an amazing feeling. So I'd suggest first finding a co-organiser who is interested in doing this and then pushing through the initial sessions by driving the topic yourself. That said, since you are preparing, you are free to choose the papers. We saw that if you choose papers related to a common larger theme that you are interested in, people would show up. Initially the attendance would be low, but with regular meetings, you'd start seeing regulars.

Congratulations on the five year mark! I co-run a similar paper reading group at Zalando (European e-commerce) and recently shared our learnings/experience[1] of running such a group for over a year and I'm happy to see so many similarities.

We focus our papers around distributed systems, software engineering and languages and try to cover more ground on the applications of the concepts discussed in the papers. The blog post also contains a "blueprint" for someone who is looking to start a similar group.

What has driven the meetups throughout the year is we being two organisers, driving the topic ourselves by preparing a presentation (not everyone would have the time to pre-read) and making the format conversational/open - very similar to what Armaan (op) shared.

One of our recent experiments was doing a collab with the Berlin Systems Group[2] where we organised an external-facing event in Berlin with attendees from outside our organisation. I was so happy to see a nice small group turn up for the event and thoroughly enjoy it!

[1] https://engineering.zalando.com/posts/2026/01/running-an-eng... [2] https://luma.com/y9edbih7

I can relate a lot to this. Maybe a part of this is also due to the language we are already familiar with. I'm not sure if the difficulty of your language would affect this, but I feel like learning a new programming language is difficult because we are very comfortable with the one which we already know.

I mostly use JavaScript for various purposes. While moving to other languages, we expect certain things to be present naturally and be as easy as they were in your previous language.

Several strong reasons, as you mentioned too, occasionally encourage me to learn a new language, but after a few days of frustration, I end up coming to JS. Maybe this is how JS/Python has spoilt me with the flexibility they provide, or maybe I am utterly lazy.

One solution to this which I can think of is building a mini project related to something the new language you are learning was originally made for. For example, if you are planning to learn Rust, try a small CLI, or some low-level project instead of directly building a web server. I'm not sure if I'm correct though.

And this from Slack: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/958645632620748800?s=20 And Skype: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20818750

Oh sorry. My bad :/

Perfectly makes sense, thanks! I must have missed it as it was earlier export default function, will update this.

This is an open source npm package I built for creating Instagram/Snapchat like stories in web using React. Just today I released a major update to it and I had never posted about the v1 here, so have a look! Also building a React Native version as many are requesting for it.