Book Review — Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual by John Sonmez

Why Read

I am a returning reader of the book. I read the first edition of the book 3 years ago. It was a printed book. At the time, I was experiencing some confusion of my career development. The book was quite inspiring, especially the content about marketing yourself, building your brand (and blogs) and considering of being a freelancer. Now I am in another bottleneck, it’s time to re-visit book.

What Obtained

The most important things the author was going to telling me:

Market yourself

• “The biggest mistake that you can make is to believe that you are working for somebody else.”
• Be a business man, sell the services you provide.
• Add value to others.
• Write blogs.
• Create you own Youtube channel.

Climbing Career Ladder

• Your aren’t a professional resume writer. Hire a resume writer.
• Manage to let the interviewer know you and like you before you go to the interview.
• Take more responsibility.
• Be visible.

Make Money

• The power of passive income

Teach Yourself

• The best way to learn something is to jump right in and start doing, before you even know what you’re doing.
• Play is a powerful mechanism for learning.
• Your gaps come from:
  Where you’re spending the most amount of time
  Repetitive tasks that could be improved
  Things that you don’t fully understand
  Job interview questions you can’t answer

Productivity

• Practice Pomodoro.
• Deal with interruptions.
• Multitasking is bad.
• Break big things down (programmers know it).

Mindset

• Pick a single bad habit that you’ve been able to identify and don’t try to change it right away.
• Be positive. Every situation that you encounter in life is open to your own interpretations. Situations don’t present themselves as “good” or “bad.”
• Stoic.