FoeFive Years of Running a Systems Reading Group at Microsoft
Hi HN, I've been organizing a systems reading group at Microsoft for five years now. I wrote down some takeaways on what worked (and what didn't). I'd love to hear if anyone else has successfully kept an engineering reading group alive at their company, or if you have any favorite systems papers we should add to our list!
Interesting. We don't have an engineering culture, so definitely no. Did you find similar groups within MSFT?
BTW heard about this paper[1] a few weeks ago, but not completely aligned with database and probably a bit too introductory for your group.
[1]https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~awang/courses/cop5611_s2024/vnode.pd...
There are other groups within Microsoft, but they usually follow a presentation format rather than a collaborative discussion. Off the top of my head, Phil Bernstein[1] and Hanuma Kodavalla[2] run great database seminars for invited speakers. I regularly attend and have presented in both forums; Phil's crowd is mostly researchers, while Hanuma's is mostly full of SQL engineers. Different from a small reading group, but still great.
Appreciate the paper link! We like going back to the basics sometimes, so I'll definitely take a look.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Bernstein
[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9eNQbZUAAAAJ&hl=en
Thanks for the references!
This is great and congrats on the success. Many years ago I tried starting a cybersecurity reading group in my city since the startup I was working at was small and people there weren’t interested in that topic. I got a lot of very green, aspiring and non-professionals to show up. We couldn’t really agree on where to start and people had different ideas of where to focus or even how much they wanted to contribute. Mostly people wanted to hear a summary and didn’t really put in the kind of effort that I had hoped. It didn’t last long. Congrats again on making it 5 years and covering so much ground.
Thank you! I think the biggest factor for us was that most attendees already had some technical baseline. That makes it way easier to pick papers and have productive discussions. A cross-experience group sounds much harder. We occasionally have non-technical people who attend (e.g., designers), but they usually are very eager to learn. The guided series format might have helped in your case, where you pick the topic and sequence upfront so there's less debate about direction each meeting. Honestly, just getting people to show up is hard at first, so the fact that you got it off the ground at all says something.
> I think the biggest factor for us was that most attendees already had some technical baseline. That makes it way easier to pick papers and have productive discussions.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
How do you suss out peoples technical aptitude, and what was the minimum level you were looking for?
How were your discussions structured?
It depends on the theme. If we're picking something in a space the group already knows well, like databases, I'll look at "Best Papers" from recent VLDB/ICDE/SIGMOD conferences. If we're exploring a topic most people are unfamiliar with, we'll go with something more foundational instead. For example, we're starting an arc on datacenters (servers, racks, networking, load balancing, power, cooling, failures, etc.), and most attendees don't have deep background there, so I found a book on the topic that we're going to read through[1].
[1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-01761-2
