Book Club
Book Club is on hiatus until further notice
Book Club is currently on hiatus.
We wrapped up reading Data & Reality by Bill Kent in early July 2025. At some point I’ll select the next book to read together, but that probably won’t be for a while. Instead of hosting a book club, I’ll be participating in Joe Reis’ book club, which will kick off in late July 2025 with “Kill it with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)” by Marianne Bellotti.
Meeting Details
To subscribe to the Google Calendar with all events (and the meeting link), click here, and then click the “Add to Google Calendar” link in the bottom left corner.
Why start a book club?
- Because other people said I should
- Because I’ve always wanted to
- Because I can gather together people who want to read the same books I want to read and then we can all talk about it, which happens to be my idea of fun
- Because I said I would
- Accountability for reading nonfiction books I genuinely want to read but struggle with because… nonfiction
Past Books
The first book was “Data & Reality” by Bill Kent (2nd ed). We read & met about this book from January - July 2025.
Once more: we are not modeling reality, but the way information about reality is processed, by people.
— Bill Kent, Data & Reality
Why “Data & Reality”? Because! If the above quote isn’t enough of a clue, this book provides a philosophical foundation for our work as data people. And philosophy is meant to be discussed, which makes it a perfect book club book.
You can download a PDF of this book at: https://github.com/jhulick/bookstuff/blob/master/Data%20and%20Reality.pdf
If you’d like to put this book on your e-reader and need to convert it, I recommend using Calibre.
But Jenna, why the 2nd edition? Well, first of all it’s free and readily available via the above link, so it is accessible. But the canonical answer is in this blog post from Hillel Wayne. If you really want a physical book, you can get the 3rd edition, but be warned that the content is not the same.