'Soft Skills: The Software Developer's Life Manual' is a book written by John Somnez, I first heard of John on the Dot Net Rocks podcast. After that I started to following his fitness podcast Get UP and Code. Nowadays I mainly follow him on his YouTube channel ‘Simple Programmer’.

So this book is about improving your career, life and achieving your goals. It's not a book about any technical aspects of software development. This book takes a holistic approach to improving your software development career i.e. you need to focus on multiple area of your life not just a few to improve your career. In today’s market just having technical expertise is not enough to get ahead in your career.

This book is divided in four main area

Career

Tools to help achieve your goals and pitfalls

Jobs are owned by the company but you own your career - Earl Nightingale Your career is your responsibility, people often make the mistake that they don’t need to worry about their career since they work for someone else. You need to treat your software career as a business, this is a mistake most people make, they delegate the responsibility of their career to their employer. Most of us work for a company, but our skills and trade belong to us. We need to look at our employer as a customer. Looking at our employer this way moves us from a position of powerlessness and dependency to autonomy and self-decision. Being a generalist early on in your career is helpful, but to grow in your career you need to focus on being a specialist. Every company values people who are not only a problem solver, but who can execute on them. Keeping a log of your activities, keeping a weekly report, giving presentation, and speaking up in meetings will help you stand out.

You also need a big far off goal that is not too specific but one that will help you navigate yourself towards this goal by completing smaller goals. Smaller goals help us course correct and gives rewards to help us stay the course.

All jobs have to deal with people as its primary requirement, you cannot win a person's heart without words of encouragement and keeping their pride intact. Rewarding a positive behaviour is more effective than punishing a negative behaviour. Words of encouragement help inspire people and promote change.

Marketing Yourself

Talent alone will only get you so far in life, the difference between great musicians and super stars is marketing. Marketing is a multiplier for talent. Good marketing helps amplify your talent and helps you stand out from the crowd.

Having a blog helps you brand and market yourself, having a tag line, elevator pitch, your niche and visuals will help you create your own brand. To increase the popularity of your blog ensure you have good content, write consistently, increase your online profile. To increase your profile, try posting thoughtful comments on other people's blogs and where possible link back to your own blog. Share your blog post on social media and add a link to your blog on your email signature. Research what is the current hot topics and write on them.

Mind

Self-learning

To learn a new technology or subject you need follow these stages:

1. How to get started
2. Breadth of the subject area
3. What are the basics you need to know - what is the 20% you need to know to cover 80% of our usage
4. LDLT - Learn Do Learn Teach

To learn something new you can follow these steps

1. Get the big picture, research what you want to learn - define your goal, the breadth of the technology, what you need to know to get started, how much of the basics do you need to know

2. Determine the scope - what you need to learn and how to break it down into a set of smaller scopes

3. Define success - have some measurable success criteria

4. Find multiple resources to help you learn

5. Using the resources, create a learning path/plan

6. Filter the resources to use the best ones

7. Learn enough to get started – the 2 most common pitfalls people face when getting started is jumping in with not knowing enough (acting too soon) or knowing too much before jumping in (acting late)

8. Play around - explore and learn

9. Learn enough to do something useful

10. Teach others

Productivity

Productivity and being effectively together is what will be extremely beneficial to you. Using the Pomodoro technique will help improve your focus and productivity, The Pomodoro technique was created by Francesco Cirillo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique)

Finance

Body

Fitness and Nutrition

Spirit

If you don’t conquer your self, your self will conquer you - Napoleon Hill The right mental attitude will impact your life. To change your attitude, you need to change your thoughts. To change your thoughts, you need to change your thought patterns. To change your patterns of thought you will need to change your habits. Failure is the path to success and one should consider failure a stepping stone to success and not an end.