Shared RSS subscriptions for a software team

Here’s a though experiment that popped into my head the other day on my way home from a rather productive pub coding session. If you’re in a team that does this, I’d love to hear about your experiences either via email or by commenting this post in Mastodon.

A team would have a shared RSS instance that everyone would subscribe to in their own RSS readers and the team would curate that feed to include blogs that are relevant to the tech stack the team is using and release note feeds (like GitHub’s Releases feeds) for libraries and services the product relies on and tools that team is using.

Did you know that by adding .atom to the end of any public GitHub repository’s Releases page URL (like https://github.com/Hamatti/nhl-235/releases.atom), you get a feed of all the updates? It’s quite marvellous. I love how GitHub offers so many feeds for different things without having to reach to their API.

Combine this with a culture where reading, learning and staying up to date is considered a valuable activity in the team. By having a shared feed and a culture of learning, everyone would see the same articles and updates and have a better shared understanding of what’s happening in the relevant fields. This could encourage more discussions about what people have read and build a cumulative understanding.

As I was brainstorming this initially in Mastodon, Daniel commented:

My main worry is that while this kind of shared RSS feeds could be useful for improving learning in a longer term (product/service focused) teams, it likely wouldn't work that well in a consultancy environment where people come and go constantly from one project to another (with completely different technology requirements).

I agree that this probably works better in long-term teams building a product together. However, if we think about a long-term project that uses a changing cast of consultants, this kind of approach could work as an anchor to codify what’s considered relevant and valuable for the project as people change.

Imagine joining an existing project as a consultant and during the onboarding, you’re given a subscription to a set of feeds that the team has over time curated. I would be very happy to join such a project. Like documentation, this would help a new person joining the team to find relevant resources and know what’s important.

This thought experiment relies on the idea that you are working in a team where people are interested in such things. Maybe not everybody needs to be but if you’re the only one curating the list and reading the articles and keeping an eye on updates, it probably won’t go far. At that point, it’s likely just easier to do it on the private RSS reader instance. But I’m sure there are teams out there that do care and I’d love to learn about their experiences in setting something like this up.