The term "soft skills" feels reductive to me.
These skills are so much more important than knowing a specific language, library, or framework and they go far even outside of tech.
https://dev.to/aspittel/the-most-important-non-programming-skills-for-programmers-iii
just had this discussion briefly with a student oh ... (checking clock) ... about 3 hours ago
@Shamar @aspittel @deejoe @Shamar
Fun fact: Even your european perspective is different from mine.
While I agree that curiosity is or at least should be the primary force a most hacker communities, the german hacker community has a lot of small annual conferences. But they have different theme then than the usual tech conference. It's about getting together, meeting (new) people and discuss the stuff you've been working on recently.
Of course it's a good thing. Many hackers don't have access to local community of like-minded people. So these events are important to share knowledge or just to talk folks facing similar problems.
Personally I never understood open source projects that aim for constantly growing userbases/market shares. My personal OS projects all solve problems I encountered at some point. If they are useful to somebody cool, if not also cool. They are fun either way.
Well actually I was defining "good thing" the fact that in Europe we have a lot of different perspectives and we are happy to discuss them. While we are not afraid to be different we are always curious to expand our Weltanschauung.
Yet I obviously agree, having places to meet is great! Even my rage against social networks does not include IRC, for example, or forums and mailing lists. Not even the #fediverse!
1/
@sebastian @Shamar @aspittel @deejoe
However you can easily find #marketing at #CCC too for example, even if way more interesting one.
What's worse however is gentrification through #CoC that I see everywhere, as if we suddenly became concerned to please mainstream people and not hurt corporate managers.
To me, an event that would refuse through its Code of Conduct a #hacker like #TerryADavis is not for hacker like me either, despite my weirdness occurs on less visible dimensions.
Ali Spittel
deejoe
Shamar
Sebastian⚡