As a developer, it might seem pretty daunting to level up your soft skills... but here’s what you can actually do: - Ask someone for feedback on a recent code review interaction. - Spend a few minutes observing how your peers communicate in meetings. - Follow up with a teammate who didn’t get to share their thoughts in the last sync. - Try changing up your next meeting invite: attach a doc, set a better time, or ask in advance what people need to prep. You don’t need a ton of time -- seriously, a focused 30-60 minutes will get you moving. And after a week or so of picking at these things, you’ll notice more awareness of how you interact (and how others react). Don’t say: “I’m just not good at the soft skill part of the job.” Try: “I’ll pick one little area and see what changes if I work on it today.” What's one thing you'll try to pay more attention to with soft skills?

So this was super cool because when I tried out the decision playground from Parallel, I had two immediate reactions: 1 ) Oh MAN was that fast (when you can see the results immediately with the sources, it's pretty crazy) 2) ... But I don't think I know how to structure questions properly like this, so how can I benefit? I had to flip the script a little bit. Instead of thinking about it like "Why wouldn't I ask an LLM in chat?", I think the better question is "If I need decisions made FAST and for very low cost, how would I accomplish that?" I have a couple of scenarios where I'd like to take some input, research, and then get a score associated with the result. And this definitely checks the box. If you have been following some of my side projects, you know I had to do a little check on Unity vs Unreal for working with agents! Looking forward to using this more. WebJev, for the win! #ParallelPartner

I'm going to sound like a broken record: Your soft skills matter more than you probably realize in software engineering. A lot of folks think that technical skills are the only lever. But if you skip developing things like self-awareness and communication, you’re going to hit friction in real work. That’s the stuff where you really have to: - Get feedback - Mess up in collaborations - Sort out misunderstandings It's not just about technical depth or building out your technical portfolio. Practice stuff that helps with working well with others. As an engineer, this is the stuff that will help you get things unstuck and move teams forward. You still gotta: - Observe how you affect others in meetings - Get feedback in code reviews and retros - Make sure you’re connecting and staying open to perspectives Have you found ways to improve your collaboration or communication that really changed the way you work with other engineers? Anything OUTSIDE of work that others can try?

Looking to learn more about CSharp and dotnet? Every weekend I publish a FREE newsletter discussing CSharp and dotnet topics. Each newsletter touches on general software engineering to get you thinking as well as linking out to some useful learning resources. With a focus on the dotnet ecosystem, there's something right up your alley in every issue. Each issue discusses: - 🧠 An exclusive article about a software engineering topic - 💻 Code snippets and code examples in C# and dotnet for you to work with - 🤯 An early access YouTube video and first-to-hear about exciting opportunities - 📽 Review of content shared throughout the week All for free. ---- 🔔 Follow for more software engineering and dotnet topics! 🗣️ Share with your network!