A brief review of Soft Skills: The software developer’s life manual 1st Edition
Soft Skills, written by John Sonmez, aims to capture the aspects of software engineering that extend beyond the command line and the IDE. Sonmez provides council on the following:
- Career - Active career management.
- Marketing - (Yourself).
- Learning - Continuing education through a hands-on approach.
- Productivity - Do the work.
- Financial - A primer on fiscal intelligence.
- Fitness - Physical health and where it fits in the Software Development Life cycle.
- Spirit - Mastery of self.
Many of these topics feel familiar. Sonmez pulls concepts from How to Win Friends & Influence People, The Power of Positive Thinking, and other popular self-improvement books. He doesn’t claim to possess secret knowledge or discoveries; he catalogs and consolidates what is already helping people and packages it in such a way as to help code monkeys like me. Herein lies the value; it’s the application of common betterment principles to our domain.
Some of these applications include
- Keeping a log of daily activities
- Turning daily log into weekly summary to send to the manager
- Giving presentations on challenges the team is facing
- Developing and Maintaining the professional mindset
- Time management
- Saying No
- Developing positive habits
- Fake it til you make it
- Marketing your value
- The importance of presence
- Productivity techniques
- Dealing with failure
It’s a quick read; I think it took me about a week of casual commitment to wrap it up. For that kind of investment, I’d say it’s worthwhile. I’ll be starting a new role soon, and a book like this was what I needed to hit the ground running.