A coworker of mine runs a bi-weekly tech book club where a bunch of people get together, read a couple of chapters of the ongoing tech book (like Clean Code) beforehand and discuss in the meeting how that can be applied in our existing codebase.

Since he runs the meeting while sharing his screen, as he goes through the pages of the chapter, he shows his highlights that he thinks are good talking points for the meeting.

I noticed that there were different colored highlights: blue, red and yellow. When asked about it, he mentioned that each color represents something:

• Blue: when he agrees with the author
• Red: when he disagrees with the author
• Yellow: when he thinks he needs to do more research on that topic

I think this convention is really good. This not only works for tech books, but also non-fiction. I’m certainly going to apply them going forward to all the tech and non-fiction books I read.