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

2 min readMar 25, 2022

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.

After reading the 1st edition of the book, I changed my mindset on marketing myself.

The 2nd edition sowed a seed of Stoic in my heart.

I like using mind-map to record content. This is the one I created for this book.