This is a book review of the book “Soft Skills: The software developer’s life manual” by John Sonmez.
What is soft skills?
Soft skills are basically the non-techical skills you need to be successful in your career and life in general. Personal traits, people skills, habits, and everything else that you need to get a job, and to keep it. There are many articles and books available about this topic, but none that specifically targets the modern software developer. At least it didn’t used to be. Thats where “Soft Skills: The software developer’s life manual” by John Sonmez come into play.
John Sonmez is the founder of the amazing blog “Simple Programmer” (www.simpleprogrammer.com), and is also involved in many different endeavours (like podcasts, development, speaking etc). He has a long track record of showing people how to get their dream job and in general get ahead in life. His blog is full of this stuff.
What is this book all about?
This book is all about everything that is NOT programming. It’s all the life tips, hacks and wisdom that a software developer might need. They are tailored for a software developer, because they were written by one. This unique angle is something that is not very well covered by others, so it’s has great potential from the get-go to be the one book all software developers need to have in their bookshelf.
The book is structured in such a way that every chapter is consumable in a matter of minutes. They can be read in any order and are as concise as can be. The book is divided into 7 sections. Each section covers a huge part of a software developers life. And each section is something John believes is very important to get as much as possible out of your life. And I agree.
Overview of the sections
I am going to drill through all the major sections of the book and summarize what they are all about.
Career
The career section covers how to get the most out of your career. How to get that job interview, how to land that dream job and so forth. It also covers different career opportunities that you perhaps not have considered (or known about) without being told about them. Lots of really useful tips that go a long way.
Marketing Yourself
This is one of John’s specialties. He is a master at software developer self-marketing. He even has a comprehensive course on it on his web site. He covers a lot of the basic things he wants you to do to market yourself, but if you are craving for more, you probably needs his big career dev boost package.
It’s a short a nice little starter for everyone who hasn’t already started marketing themselves.
Learning
How to learn yourself things. He covers his 10-step program for learning new technologies which is really detailed and a great help for anyone who aren’t so great at this. You don’t even have to follow the 10-step program to learn some new trick and perhaps get another perspective on this learning process that all developers need.
Productivity
This is a big one for me. I love productivity. However I felt like this chapter wasn’t enough for me. But that is probably because I have studied this field on my own for a long time. That said, John really touches on some extremely important topics like focus and reasons to why you aren’t really productive (and where you are waisting your time). It’s a great primer for the productivity beginner/intermediate, while also giving some real techniques that you can apply for yourself.
Financial
Money. What to do with it. John is an expert at this. He has virtually retired at an age of 33 because of passive income. And he is sharing it all with you! It’s not get-rich-quick scheme, but tips on how to invest your money in a wise way. He also gives a primer on stock market which I found really interesting.
Fitness
Again, John is the one to listen to. He know fitness because he has been doing it for a long time (and it shows). He has been in bodybuilder competitions and done some impressive weight-loss. He shares is wast knowledge on the field, without trying to come off as a nutrition expert or certified doctor (even though he shows some deep knowledge on some of these fields). He just know what works, and he lets us know.
Spirit
This is not as spacey as you might think. Its pretty down-to-earth actually. It details the importance of positive thinking and how to get in touch with yourself in a way that will benefit you. I didn’t think I was going to like this section that much, but I was intrigued and I am learning more about these subjects right now.
Conclusion
I really liked this book. It was right up my alley. In almost every way this book resonated with me. It got me thinking about new subjects, it got me inspired to continue working on others. It was all-around an impressive book that I think every software developer should own.
Go get it on Amazon or Manning
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