Slightly off topic but how did you find a group of people to do this with? I’d love to but I can’t imagine anyone in my social circles/work acquaintances doing this with any book.
...and an IRC channel. The wiki wasn't much used, IRC was where everything happened. I think the way to do it today would be a discord server, and you need more people than you think to start; they will drop off fast.
I got a much deeper level of comfort with approaching "hard problems" and it was a bridge to complexity analysis, programming language theory, etc.