How do you keep your software development skills marketable?

For engineers to maximize impact today, technical skills alone are not enough. While writing efficient code is key, interpersonal abilities are crucial to collaborate effectively. "10x" engineers often struggle to work well with others, limiting their capacity to achieve goals despite brilliance. To complement technical expertise, developers must build soft skills like empathy, communication, and emotional intelligence to improve teamwork. Resources like Addy Osman's "Software Engineering - The Soft Parts" guide developing these human strengths. Ultimately, well-rounded developers with both technical and interpersonal skills will be most valuable now.

Hobby projects are very good reference in case (most cases) it is sensitive to demostrate your daily work at your company. It can be just a bug fix or a few lines of contribution to an exisiting open source project, or your own automation scripts, etc. The only limit is your imagination. And it is up to you to choose the tech stack, so that it is perfect showcase to try out some hottest technologies to keep your skills refresh.

Working on personal projects can help you learn new things, especially when you're using new technology. Plus, if you make your project available to the public, it can be helpful to others. Personally, I'm working on a project that has been downloaded more than 10K times on the Google Play Store. This project not only helps me learn new technology but also teaches me how to handle user feedback, feature requests, and fixing bugs.

Also, provide mentorship. Mentoring others is one of the ways to both keep your skills and develop new ones. Mentoring is not only beneficial for those being mentored but also enriches the mentor's professional development. Sharing your expertise with others can solidify your own understanding and even expose you to new perspectives. Moreover, the mentorship process establishes a culture of continuous learning, teamwork, and open dialogue with your fellow engineers. This is integral for keeping up with rapidly evolving technologies and methodologies in software development.

Contribute to open-source projects. This is a great way to make yourself shine - your "resume" is out there in the code. Also, a lot of open-source projects are using cutting-edge technologies. This way, you can work with the newest technologies in an actual project, not a demo/dummy project.

Volunteer to do the nastiest tasks. Learning by doing is a great way to improve yourself. Also, dive deeper into the technologies you use today. A lot can be learned by inspecting the "black magic" behind a framework or package.

Networking with others, focusing on personal branding and overall putting your work out there helps a lot. Being part of a bigger community like there is here on LinkedIn is a great way to always have oportunities available to you. You can be the best engineer in the world, but if people don’t know how good you are, you will miss out on a lot of them!