Developer's Journey vs other books

Soft Skills from Jon Sonmez

A while back, I started listening to the Entreprogrammers podcast in which the developer and entrepreneur Jon Sonmez performs a weekly update with three other "entreprogrammers" (I really recommend the podcast bytheway).

Jon wrote a book called Soft Skills which at first sounded a lot like my Developer's Journey. Fortunately, Jon tackles quite different topics. Here's part of the book's abstract:

John Sonmez addresses a wide range of important "soft" topics, from career and productivity to personal finance and investing, and even fitness and relationships, all from a developer-centric viewpoint

I listened to the audiobook and confirm that, if it is indeed a very interesting and captivating book, it has little overlap with Developer's Journey.

The passionate programmer from Chad Fowler

I interviewed Amitai Schlaier - author of the Agile in 3 minutes podcast - right before christmas.

In the discussion, Amitai pointed me out to a blog post of Chad Fowler called Who I Want to Hire, which starts like this:

There’s a person I want to work with. I can’t find this person. I’ve literally searched the world, and I can hardly find a trace. I’m not talking about someone specific. In fact, that’s the problem. I’m talking about a set of traits and an attitude which is more scarce than I realized until recently...

The list of traits he makes comprise tenacity, fun, attitude, communication, focus, methodology, effectiveness etc. This list has a great overlap with Developer's Journey.

Following on Chad's work, I discovered that he expanded this list into a book called The passionate programmer, which overlap even more with Developer's Journey. I just started reading it to see to which extend...

Does this change anything for Developer's Journey? Well maybe... I don't know yet. But it certainly drive me back to thinking about the target audience and the goals of the book once again... which in itself isn't a bad point anyway. But there sure is enough space for two in there...

Any idea which angle could be interesting here? Both in terms of marketing position and content?

Cover image: Ginny, CC BY-SA 2.0