Another way to show your programming skills and your tech talent -- have a public GitHub or GitLab, fork some other repo's and add to them w/ P/Rs, learn new skills and try out projects publicly in GH, and let them see how you organize / code / comment / build / etc. And keep doing that to learn new things. I have done that for a little over a decade myself. And I encourage people in H.S., College or otherwise to do the same.

At the same time, it does not hurt do develop the soft-skills side and read things like "How to Win Friends and Influence People" kind of books / podcasts / audiobooks. Human nature = human nature.