Austin Software Reading Group

I run a twice-monthly, in-person book club for experienced software engineers. We read technical books that make us better at building robust software, and discuss them in the context of our professional experience.

Reading group format

• Attendance is limited to folks with 5+ years of professional engineering experience.
• Books will focus on concrete software topics rather than abstract software philosophy.
• Roughly 50 pages of reading a week, covering 2 to 4 chapters per meeting.
• We meet at 7:00PM the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays of every month in central Austin.
• Discussion is group-led, so bring questions and any relevant past experience to share with the group.

Next book: Starting April 7th

Systems Performance by Brendan Gregg

We'll explore how operating systems and applications actually perform, covering CPU, memory, storage, and networking performance. This book provides a systematic approach to diagnosing performance issues along with the Linux tools to do it.

Reading schedule

1. Introduction, 2. Methodologies

2026.04.07

3. Operating Systems, 4. Observability Tools

2026.04.21

5. Applications, 6. CPUs

2026.05.05

7. Memory, 8. File Systems

2026.05.19

9. Disks, 10. Network

2026.06.02

11. Cloud Computing, 12. Benchmarking

2026.06.16

13. perf, 14. Ftrace

2026.07.07

15. BPF, 16. Case Study

2026.07.21

Want to join? Sign up.

Future reads

Generally we'll read long format books. Occasionally we may read white papers, focused essays or blog posts, and even the source code of significant projects. Here's some potential future readings:

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Database Internals
• Raft Consensus Algorithm (white paper)

Credit: Austin Software Reading Group was inspired by Phil Eaton's Software Internals Book Club.