How our tradition of giving books as gifts began

Some teams celebrate achievements with pizza, others with after-office drinks, and then there is us, the team that celebrates with books. Yes, while some choose a toast or a corporate gift, at Grava it is far more likely that the boss is wrapping a copy of Animal Farm.

When we think about a gift for someone on the team, we look for something that represents us and reflects who we are. Since our culture is deeply shaped by reading, much of what we know, or at least what we think we know, comes from books. That is why sharing them is our way of continuing to learn together.

The intersection between reading and technology

In an environment where technical topics often dominate the conversation, books allow us to go a step further. Reading enriches soft skills, critical thinking, and creativity, competencies that are just as important as knowing how to write a solid endpoint or maintain a scalable architecture.

In fact, several schools of thought within software engineering recognize the value of external disciplines:

• Creativity and design, driven by speculative fiction, which prepares us to imagine possible futures.

• Systems thinking, strengthened by political or sociological essays that help us understand structures, power dynamics, and patterns that also exist in digital systems.

• Problem solving, enhanced by narratives that present complex conflicts and unexpected solutions.

A book may not include a single line of code, yet it can still improve how a developer thinks through solutions.

A tradition that defines us

Over time, gifting books has become an internal tradition and a way to promote new perspectives. Technical knowledge is great, but when it is combined with literary, philosophical, or political ideas, the most unexpected connections appear.

Anyone who visits Grava at the end of the year, or during important milestones, usually comes across the same scene: someone on the team receiving a book that fits perfectly with that moment in their professional or personal journey.

What matters is not the title, but the gesture. The message is clear: we are giving you knowledge, we are giving you a new perspective, we are sharing something that shaped us too.

As Neil Gaiman said, “Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside them, and it is much cheaper to buy someone a book than it is to buy them the whole world.”