Future of work: why soft skills are important

Michelle: So my talk today is titled The Future of Work Soft Skills and the Dream Team. And I've got about 25 minutes to talk through all these things and it's going to be a little bit crazy. Yep. This is my deck. It's all using. Yep. It's working. It's going.

Yes. I'm not using a deck. I'm using my screen. So yep. Roll with it. Just put me up on the screen and I've got everything here. So yeah, really exciting to share this talk with a lot of you. It's something that developers are moving towards and focusing on as we move forward.

We know lots of developers are building out those really good hard skills like programming language and coding and things like that. But now what we're doing is looking at, well, how do you pair those up with some of the soft skills that people are really wanting to hire people for?

So we're going to talk about what those are and we're going to talk about how do you build the dream team and through that, how do you work better with non-developers? So how do developers and non-developers work better together to build really cool things and really awesome products. So yeah, let's get started. So as I said, my name is ish. I'm known as the Hackathon Queen. It's kind of like a title that a lot of the community gave me, which is quite exciting.

It's a fun title. It's something that I got after doing a whole bunch of hackathons and I did about a good 60 hackathons or so in the space of a couple of years. And now I've done over 90 now I think. So lots and lots of hackathons, which is really exciting. So that's why they call me the hackathon queen. So it's a little bit about me.

I'm from Australia, so hello to all the Australians and all the people in the APAC time zone. I know it's evening for us for anyone tuning in.

I know it's like 3:00 AM in America, so welcome to you over. I'm in America and in all parts of the world it's morning. So good morning if you're from there. All right, let's dive straight into the future of work. This is a topic that I have been speaking a lot about over the last couple of years, quite an exciting topic I find. And when I think about the future of work, nobody really knows what the future is going to be like. Lots of people look at different types of movies. So one of 'em is like the minority report and look at that and go, well, is this the type of thing that we want to, is this going to be the future of work, the manual report?

Other things could be like, are we going to be creating or curating our own work, our own things? We are not even going to do any work. So there's a whole talk I could give about that, but we only have 25 minutes here or about 25 minutes at all, a bit less. So I'm not going to dive into the whole aspect of what work is and why people need to work and the motivations around working and things like that. So today we're just going to dive into straight into the future of work and move into what we can currently see. So I say lot of people think it might be like Matrix. If anyone is into Pixar movies or anything like that, you might've seen this one, Wally. Some people think this might be the future of work where we don't actually do any work and we end up being the robots do all the work for us.

So I think what we're currently at is this hybrid approach of where we are working with machines and we're doing some of the work. They're doing some of the work, and that's what we call industry 4. 0 or the fourth industrial revolution. And through this revolution, what we're seeing is a massive rise in automation, in data sharing, in cybersecurity, in IO, ot, cloud computing, anything that's kind of like digital, we're seeing this huge rise in it. And that's what we call the fourth industrial revolution. So if you think back to the last industrial revolution where we had all this crazy, everyone moving away from manufacturing and physically putting things together to moving into mass scale producing without the fourth industrial revolution, which is very much a digital revolution if you will, and what a lot of people are worried about in this fourth industrial revolution. Is there going to be any work for people or is everything simply going to be computers and is everything just going to be machines doing everything, ai doing everything?

And so people have this fear or this worry to the point of view where they're like, well, am I going to have a job essentially?

So if we look at, this is all I really love this website, so if you have a look at it there, time. com/robots, jobs, machines and work. For those of you who are tuning into the Twitch chat, which I can see some of you, hello. I'm going to pop a link in there. So you can go onto that right now. And if you jump onto that link, it's a website that literally is called Will a Robot Take My Job? And you can put your occupation in there, whatever are doing currently, and it'll give you some information or a percentage scale of what's the likelihood that a robot is doing your job. Often when I put this up, I'll give you a little bit of time to do it.

If people are in the Twitch chat, you want to let me know if your job is going to be taken or do let me know. But lots of people say, oh, my job isn't even likely to be taken by a robot. It's already being done by a robot. But I know lots of developers here, your jobs are probably in the safe percentile. There's lots of things that we as developers that can do that robots can't. But there's also a lot of things that robots can do that we can't. So they can do a lot of menial tasks, mundane tasks, they can assign work really easily, they can trial through big chunks of data and things like that. So if you think about your job and if people are the ones putting this in and your job is taken, think about or it's saying it is going to be taken, think about why.

What are the aspects of your job that makes it likely the robot could take it? And on the flip side, if your job isn't going to be taken or it's a low likelihood of your job being taken, what would be the factors or the characteristics of your job that makes it viable for you to continue doing your job? So let me know there and see what you come up with. But if we look at what's happening around the world a lot and in a lot of the jobs, it's really a hybrid approach. There's not really a lot of jobs these days that don't have at least some form of artificial intelligence, some form of robotics, some form of digitization, some form of automation in your job. For example, my calendar is color-coded. So if I put a different specific keyword, my calendar will colour code itself that is at a very, very low level automation and that is already a robot helping me with my job.

So if we think about robots too, they're not necessarily the humanoid robots you might think of when you think of iMovie eye robot or something like that.

It is also what's happening on the digital side of things. And I really, really love this quote though from this is a famous TED Talk given by Gary, I cannot say his last name of he's Polish. He gave this TED talk about how machines will never actually replace humans. I'll move myself slightly off the screen so you can see as well. But he says this and that's that machines have calculations, but we as humans have understanding machines have instructions, but we as humans have purpose. Machines have objectivity, but we have passion and therefore we should not worry about what our machines can do today. Instead, we should worry about what they still can't do because we'll need the help of these machines or we'll need the help of this new intelligent machine to turn out grander streams into reality.

So I really like his talk because it's really about thinking about the possibilities of what's happening.

And this is what I talk about when we talk about this high road approach of don't be worried that the robots are coming because they're basically already here. And what we need to be thinking about is what are the skills that we as people can develop, that we can cultivate and we can grow and build on that are going to compliment these digital age that's coming to us? And a lot of developers already know a lot of these skills. You're probably using them already today in your jobs, but I went and double checked. So I've given this talk a couple of times and I went and updated it because the last time I gave a similar future of work talk, it was the last year. So I went and updated the list of skills needed for the future of work, and these are the types of skills that employers are looking at. These are the types of skills that employers want to hire people on right now. So let's check out list.

This is a list. This comes from LinkedIn. So LinkedIn are the ones that do this study. Each year there is a link to, oh, sorry, I'm just grabbing the link for you all for those again in the Twitch chat. Here is the link.

Sorry, I'm just laughing because there's a few people in the Twitch chat who are my regular viewers on Twitch. I'm a Twitch streamer as well. I'm just laughing because they're like, who are you again?

So that's exciting to see some of my regular view here. But yes, this is a study that runs every year by LinkedIn that pulls out the top skills of future of work. They do a top 10 list for soft skills, sorry, top five lists, the top soft skills and a top 10 list for hard skills. I put the top five for both. That link that I posted shows you the methodology where they actually show you how they come up with this data. And it's really important to look at when you're looking at where you get your data from, is it useful data? So the way they do this, they build out these what are the top skills that are most important to hires.

What they do is they look at the skills companies are needing the most because on LinkedIn you can tick all the different skills.

They look at the skills in higher demand in terms of supply. They also look at skills of people that are getting hired at the highest rate and they only look at cities with where there's a hundred thousand or more LinkedIn members. So you get that really nice broad range. So these are a really good, by all means, it's not perfect. Most of these methodologies, none of them are ever perfect, but it's a good one. And yeah, I just want to touch on this. I think it's really important. So I'm talk a little bit about the hard skills first because the soft skills are what we're going to focus on.

So we'll call it the hard skills. And these are the top five hard skills that are most in demand as of this year.

So January, 2020, these are the top hard skills. So blockchain, cloud computing, analytical reasoning, artificial intelligence, and UX design. So you look at those, even looking at cloud computing, artificial intelligence, you go, oh, well obviously developers are the ones helping programme those. But if you look at it, at the end of the day, we're looking to programme those to, for want of a better word, programme ourselves out of a job. And if we look at these top skills on the hard skill side, just for reference blockchain, which is number one is a brand new section. This wasn't even on the list last year and this year it's number one.

So it's really interesting to see that shift in blockchain. The other new one on the list is affiliate marketing, which I think is sitting about six or seven. That's a new one that's showing that the way we do marketing these days is not so much B2C anymore, it's like almost C two C, it's customer to customer marketing.

So B2C is business to customer. So instead of a lot of businesses doing customer marketing these days, they're using affiliates to do marketing. We see the shift in people wanting to be more personal and wanting reviews. So rather than what a company says about itself. So that one's an interesting one.

It's also interesting to note that scientific computing has moved up three spots on the top 10 list of hard skills. Sales remains the same on the list of soft skills and video production is down as well. One of the reasons for that is because a lot of computers are doing video production these days. So even if you're a video producer, editor, keep a look at your job is slowly going down, but if we look at the top five there, every single one of them is related to technology or is in this tech business.

And of the top 10, only three are non-tech and that is the affiliate marketing. I mentioned sales, and there's another business analytics as well. So congratulations and kudos to all the people working in technology. Technology is a very good area to be in right now.

Obviously it's very in high demand. So those are the hard skills just for an FYI for everyone. But what we really want to focus today on is soft skills because a lot of developers already, as I mentioned before, already cultivating those hard skills. They're already going out and learning code and doing code and being involved in code. What we really want to look at is these skills which are right above me, and this is the top five list in order of the most desired soft skills of 2020 as of January, 2020. And you can see their creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability and emotional intelligence. If we look at that list, I'm just going to have a quick look at this. What did I write here?

I'm just trying to look at which ones moved up and down.

Of these ones here, of the top four, all of them are exactly the same as they were last year. The only new one is emotional intelligence. So creativity was already number one even as of last year and I think even the year before, employers have always wanted that creative vibe. And the reason for that is because if you're creative, you're able to solve problems in a different way, able to use innovation, you're able to use for the hackers and developers out there, you can hack around the problem and you can be really creative about the solution that you build. And that's why creativity is one of those top soft skills that they want people to have. But what I'm going to talk today about is really going to focus in on, hone in on is this collaboration because a lot of people are building up this creativity, and I'll touch on creativity as we're going, but what I really want to talk about is collaboration.

This is an area that if you can nail down, you can get a lot of the other ones roughly right as well.

Because if you can collaborate with the right people, you almost don't need to build out every single soft skill for yourself. So think about it, if you're a developer and you can collaborate really well with your sales and marketing team, say for example, you don't need to be as creative in your problem solving because you can lean on the expertise and the experience of other people within your team. So this collaboration is really, really important. And one of the other reasons I want to to touch on it is it's because a lot of developers already are aware of collaboration or aware of where it sits within their skillset, maybe not about how it works. And the reason I want to talk about it is because actually one of the four pillars of DevOps, so I'm going to move myself just off the screen a little bit so you can see it. These are the four pillars of DevOps. And all of the developers here hear the word DevOps all the time, and it's that funky new thing that everyone is doing.

But at the end of the day, not a lot of people know what actually is DevOps.

They just think it's this cool thing that developers do and it's a way to work. What DevOps really is is a combination of software development and operations practises, and it's as much a cultural thing as it is about the technology itself. So if we look at the four pillars of DevOps, collaboration, which is the one we're going to focus on today, workflows and automation. So said about the future of work, that's something that is really changing this automation. We can see that in a lot of the products that different big tech companies are building at the moment. A lot of it is really, really geared towards automating your workflows, automating your production cycles. You can automate a lot of things. People can focus on the things that actually matter and that's that problem solving that creativity and things like that.

Security and compliance is a massive, massive thing. I know a lot of people saw some of the hacks app and on Twitter yesterday about some of the big accounts. Obviously want to keep everything secure and nice and obviously you don't want your code going anywhere. So security and compliance is a massive, massive thing. Security because you want to make sure your code is secure and everyone's data and privacy is protected. And also compliance because a lot of big tech companies are working with and a lot of developers are working with government organisations and big corporates where they need to be compliant to certain things. Certains a big area of DevOps. And the other one is continuous improvement.

We know that from the way we work at the moment, and that is always not being happy with what's the current state of things is and always just improving and improving.

So you'll see that nearly every tech company will have a change log, what's new, what's different, what's improving, what's coming? So that's really exciting. So those are the four pillars of DevOps. And so the one we're going to focus on today is collaboration. I'm going to move myself back to here. So yeah, collaboration something that a lot of us know about, but something that maybe not everyone actually practises in a day-to-Day work, whether it's because it's the culture of your workplace or because it's just not the done thing or because you just don't know people in the rest of the organisation. But we all know that collaboration is literally nothing new.

Big industries and companies and small and large and all over the world having been collaborating one another for decades, they're always bringing new ideas to the table, they helping to solve problems. People are supporting one another.

And through collaboration you can build morale and not just in your own team but throughout your entire workplace. And we know at the forefront of every bit of collaboration is teamwork because obviously if you collaborate and everything is, there's nothing actually happening because everyone's not cohesive and moving together as a team, we know that you won't be successful. So if you collaborate well and you work together well as a team, you can be way, way more successful than you ever can by yourself. And by working in teams, you can ensure all your goals are hit, you can do things in a timely manner, you can divide and conquer, you can come together to solve problems. And it's really important that this of collaboration, teamwork not just happens within your immediate team, but across your entire organisation. And when that happens, you'll build way better things and way better products and you'll just move forward a lot quicker.

So if I haven't mentioned before, I'm work as the developer community manager at GitHub, so I'm not going to do any product sell or anything to you today. But what I really wanted to talk about is this is one of NA's favourite quotes, or actually it's coming up, but this used to be a quote that I still use within my team currently, and I come from a sporting background as well. So I used to love this quote, which is together everyone achieves more. And that is so true that when we work together, we can achieve way more than we can as each individual person. I did mention I do work at GitHub, and this is one of Nats favourite quotes. So Nat Freeman, the CEO of GitHub says Coding is a team sport. And we know that through the way GitHub works and the open source collaboration that we have happening all over the platform, that it is a very, very much a collaborative thing.

Coding.

Coding is no longer one of those things where you do it by yourself in your basement, your pizza goes in under the door code comes out. It's not really that anymore. Coding's very much moved towards this problem solving collaborative work together, solve the come up with an idea, solve the problem, but do it as a team. And this is what I really like about coding is being able to do all this kind of cool stuff together. And I did mention I was a hackathon queen as well. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how coding and team plays into doing hackathons. So a lot of people have been a hackathons have probably heard of this whole hacker hustle of hipster kind of vibe that we got going in hackathons. And this really refers to the different types of roles in the hackathon at GitHub.

Now we've started calling them the designer, the coder or the innovator, and we've just kind of come up with these terms to kind of explain a little bit more about the different roles in hackathon. But if you haven't done a hackathon before, we've got three main roles in hackathon and you can branch out these three main roles to almost any project team or workplace team or any new startup. And that's your coders, your technology person, your developer, your designer who is your UX, customer experience, product design type person. And your innovators, like your business person, your marketer, your sales, they're the one that gathers all the information and starts mapping out the idea itself. And the idea about having three main roles in a hackathon team or in an organisation is that by having these clear roles, you can really divide and conquer essentially. So one of the examples I like to use is say if you did a hackathon and you all went just as a coding team and you were just like, cool, we're going to come today and we're just going to build something cool and we're going to code the thing and we all like vr, so let's code some VR stuff.

And then you end up with this really, really cool VR thing that's really coded. The backend works really well, but you've got no design elements at all and the user experience is terrible and you've got no, it doesn't actually solve any problem or it doesn't actually, there's no market opportunity for it or there's no real reason for it.

That sort of happened. If you go as a team of just coders, if you go as a team of just designers, you might have something that looks really pretty and awesome, but it doesn't actually work. And again, it doesn't solve problem. Or if you've just got all innovative people, businessy type people come with these really cool ideas, but then it doesn't actually go anywhere. You don't have anyone to actually help you execute it. So if you build a team as, and this is what we call the dream team, by having a really good mix of these three key areas, you get the unicorn magic happening.

I like to use the unicorn thing because everyone in startups is like woohoo unicorn. And a unicorn in startup speak is a company that's raised over a billion dollars or is worth over a billion dollars, sorry.

So if you have a really good team dynamic and a really, really good team breakup, you can really make some really cool things happen. So often when you're pitching for a hackathon idea, whether you're pitching for a business or you want to get some investment or whatever happens to be, what is one of the things that they always look at, they always look at the team go, who is the team behind this? Can this team execute? Can they build the thing? Can they do this stuff? So this is why collaboration is really important because often as developers you might often go to hackathon and go, yeah, we're just going to code all the things, do all stuff, but if we work across the organisation or you bring other people involved, you get some really cool things happening.

So if we look at across an org, you might have some different teams here across an organisation. So you might have your developers, you might have some marketing salespeople, you might have some workplace experience people, you might have some businessy type people over here.

What happens is if they're all working in their own little bubbles, essentially the developers are building stuff they don't know what's for, so they're just building it away and they don't really have context on what's happening. The businessy people are going all off doing all these great business strategy and business development, but they're not listening to the sales or marketing team who's actually got all the customer feedback. They've got all these experience type people up here just like woohoo, creating cool experiences. Again, we dunno who for, but we're just doing all these things. What you can get is that nothing quite works out.

You just left with nothing. And one of the examples I often give is if you put 50 lawyers in a room together and you give them a problem and all those 50 lawyers are from the same company, they have the same pay grade, they're from the same location, they have the same family circumstances, they went to the same school, you're probably going to get 50 of the same or very similar ideas. No diversity there.

So as soon as you start having a little bit of diversity in the team, whether it's a developer, a marketer, a sales person, a management person, customer experience, as soon as you start adding someone else's perspective, you really get a different way of building or designing something, you end up coming up with a way, way more holistic product. So if you do work together across an organisation, you collaborate on a unified goal, you really do come up with some really amazing things and you'll find that you'll just like what if you do will just work a lot better.

And there was an example of a company who did this. What they did is, sorry, I'm just laughing at the Twitch chat. Some of the people in the Twitch chat are saying, yay, my job is safe. Congratulations. Your job is safe. That's awesome.

Yeah. So there was a business who tried this out and was like, look, we're not getting a lot of collaboration across our business. What we should do is we should get people to work better together. So what they did is they got the developers to go out with the sales and marketing team for a week on the job. So the sales and marketing team were doing their thing. The developers were just see what happens. And after each couple of times the developers were like, so after you've done the say we've spoken to that person or put this thing, why do you do this, this, and this?

They're like, oh, because that's just the way it has to do.

That's the way the system works. And developers really, that takes so long. Oh, give us a moment. We can build something really cool. We'll just hack together something for you and build something that, here you go, that's sweet. Now you can go off and do the theatre. They're like, wow, that's so cool. And because the developers actually got the experience of seeing how marketers work, they were able to provide some really, really cool solutions to some of their problems that they're facing.

And then the following week, they flipped. So the marketers went and sat with the business, so the developers and was like, oh, so that's how you build something and that's how you design something. And then if we request changes, oh, I can see how it takes ages and stuff, so therefore we should do all our feedback and ideas and stuff to you at this stage and then do another stage here.

And they would iterate here again. And they just found that after a few weeks that things were in the business just happened so much more succinctly and so much better because of the way the team was collaborating and everyone had a much more of an understanding of what happened on the other side of the organisation. And this doesn't mean that you need to go and have your developers and marketers and sales and business people sit together every single week, but it's just about having that awareness of how something works in another team, how a process works, how they do something. So if you do request something of them, you have an understanding of what you're actually asking for and things can happen so much quicker. You can fast track a lot of stuff.

Again, I work for GitHub and I'm not going to do a hard sell on you, but the way a lot of these organisations work and the way they collaborate across organisations is using different platforms, and one of those platforms is GitHub.

Again, not to do a hard sell on you, but here's some of the few things that you can do on GitHub that allow developers and non-developers to work much closer together. We've just released discussions, which allows you to have really cool synchronous and asynchronous discussion threads like you would in an issue for those developers who work with issues. The one I just want to show really, really, really quickly, again, no hard sell, it's just this one because I've just found it works so well across orgs and across organisations, and I use it every single day and we use it every single day, whether it's our developers or our non-developers. And it's a really good way to collaborate. And that's this project boards that we have on GitHub, and this is the GitHub one, but there's so many other different project boards out there as well that you can use.

But these are such a great tool for collaboration because I mean, especially with the GitHub one as well, you can link all your issues, you can comment, you can have everyone that's not a developer have eyes on what you're doing and what the project is doing. And it is just get way more collaboration happening.

So I'm saying you'll have to go out and use GitHub right now, but whatever platform you do want to use or whichever thing you do want to use to collaborate better, just remember that we do want this collaboration to happen and we really do want these dream teams to happen and to pop up because it is such a really good way to work for future. It's a great way to future proof yourself by collaborating. Again, it is one of the top five skills, soft skills that employers are looking for, and it's going to be really, really important for the future of work.

And it already is really important. Something that quite frankly, machines can't really do right now. They're really good at collaborating in terms of code dependencies and things like that, but they can't really look at different problems and solve different things. So my ask for you all today, because I always have an ask or a called action, every single one of my talk is, next time you're working on a project or thinking about something, just stop and take a moment to have a think about. Do you have the right people in the room?

Do you have the right experience and expertise, and have you heard the right voices when you're working on a new project? And think about is there a way that you can bring in another person into this who may be from another team or may have a different perspective on a problem you're trying to solve or an idea you're wanting to come up with a new feature, a new product, a new platform, whatever happens to be, just think about how you can collaborate better with people. Yeah. And with that, I will open it up for question time. There's the slider that you've all been asking questions on, and I know the mc is keen to throw some questions over me. So question time from the floor.

MC: Okay, Michelle, thank you for the presentation. We have some questions and the slider side, first of all, what kind of hackathon are you involved in mainly and why that?

Michelle: Great question. I'm involved in every type of hackathon. I've done hackathons, so when I talk about my involvement, I've designed hackathons, I've organised hackathons, I've advised people on hackathons, I've mentored at hackathons, I've judged at hackathons, and I've participated in hackathons as well. So every aspect of a hackathon, I've been involved in it. And then every type of hackathon I've also been involved in, I've been involved in really heavy tech focused hackathons where literally the idea is just to build something that works. So I've been involved in those ones. I've been involved in hackathons around some of the most recent ones around covid and coming up with ideas and solutions to combat some of the issues that we're facing with Covid. Right now, I've been involved in climate change hackathons, autonomous driving hackathons, smart city hackathons, future of work stuff, tech focused ones where it might be like Microsoft Focus, say for example.

So use softs tech stack to build something. I've done hackathons around aged care, health tech, med tech, sports tech, kind of like you name it, I've pretty much done it. Space gaming, vr, ai, all of them. And the reason I'm involved in all of them is I have a quite a broad area of expertise when it comes to doing lots of things. I've run four or five companies myself in various different industries. I'm involved in the gaming side of things. I do a lot of Twitch streaming. He's why I'm giving all shout outs to people on Twitch because few of my regular viewers are in there.

So I do Twitch streaming as well. I'm involved in a lot of future of work stuff through my entrepreneurial journey and through a lot of the mentoring that I do for people who are building their own businesses.

And I've been involved in a lot of smart city stuff, not just through my first artificial intelligence company that I built, but through my current electric scooter startup as well, electric scooter company. Yeah. So that's why I get involved in all things. I just have a lot of interest and really keen to help out people. I think that is one of my top pieces of advice too. If you want to do a hackathon, just get out and do it.

A lot of people go, oh, I really want to be involved in, say for example, one of the most recent ones was call for code, IBM's call for code, which was targeting challenges and problems around climate change and covid, a lot of people said, oh, I don't really have any, I'm not really a good coder, or I haven't really done a hackathon before. Just do it. Whatever kind of experience you've got, I guarantee you it'll be useful at a hackathon, whether you've got business experience, whether you're a developer or a coder, whether you've got marketing experience, we've got startup experience, or even just life experience it often, all of it will come in handy. I've seen people who are really, really sceptical about going to hackathon, then they go to one and say, that was the most amazing thing ever. When's the next one? So yeah, that's my piece of advice for hackathon goers or hackathon thinkers. If you're thinking about going one

MC: That is so much hackathons, that's why you are called the hackathon queen.

Michelle: Yes, that is right.

MC: Is there anything, what is your favourite one?

Michelle: Oh, I actually got asked this question the other day, so perfect timing. I was giving a presentation to all the interns over at Major League Hacking, also happens to be a GitHub partner as well. We've got a collaboration partnership going there. So yeah, they did ask me what my favourite hackathon was, and I was like, look, I'm slightly biassed about this. I'm not going to lie. Back in 2016, I ran the NASA space apps challenge. So every couple of years NASA puts up a space apps challenge that anyone can run a hackathon.

I ran this hackathon in April, 2016. About 250 people came along a physical in-person hackathon. And the reason I love that hackathon so much was the diversity of ideas that were actually presented. So the way space apps runs is there's a whole lot of different challenges, which leads to a whole lot of diversity of ideas.

But we got everything from the winner was this guy who built this origami paper solution that demonstrated how you would save space on the ISS at the International Space Station. So that was a guy who, we had a lady present a picture book on showing people how to, we're showing kids about how space travel works, and we had some guys build this VR environment that would train astronauts on how to get to Mars and the climate in Mars. I actually participated in this one as well, which is again why it's one of our favourites because I organised anticipate it, and my team and I built a jet powered rocket propellant thing that ran on dry ice. If you switch to dry ice for toluene, it would propel astronaut on Mars.

And then we had people showing off. They came in with a pile of a box of sand and they were throwing things into the sand and using artificial intelligence and image recognition to understand what thing or what object made that crater. So it was just this crazy hackathon of just all these different ideas happening. And although there was no cash prizes whatsoever, I had so many different companies throw things my way. So I had a lot of different prizes for the best use of hardware to the best use of data sites or whatever. So more than half the participants actually walked away with something on that day. So it was just such an exciting hackathon, and yeah, that's why it's my favourite one. And again, I'm a little bit biassed, but yeah, it's my favourite.

MC: Well, we have one more question. Do you have time later time about one?

Michelle: What

MC: Two? I can answer it really quickly. We've got two minutes left. I'll answer it. Sorry. Okay, one more question, Michelle, from current COVID-19 situation, we have to get skills online.

What is the best way to learn these soft skill?

Michelle: Oh, amazing. I love this question. Again, something I've been doing recently. There's a lot of people online who are doing online tutorials and learning sessions. I'll drop a link into the Twitch as soon as I jump off here because I don't want to waste time finding it now. But I wrote an article recently on where are the best places to learn on the internet right now for free years? And most of it was around coding.

There's a whole lot of free places that are giving up coding lessons on Coder Academy, Khan Academy, things like that. I really encourage you, if you're the type of person like me who likes to learn by doing or learn with other people, I actually do live coding sessions on my Twitch channel, so totally go follow me on Twitch. So here's all my social media. I'm literally mish manners on every social media platform known to man.

So go follow me there and jump in on the community there. But there's so many places online to learn for free. And again, same with hacks. I encourage you just to get in there and start this whole like, oh, I'm not sure where to start, or I'm just going to tip to it.

Just get in there and do it. So I'll post a link with all the resources on where to learn if you want a particular language or where to go to even think about what language to start. And also on Twitch, again, I know I've got just running out of time, but I myself am involved in a live coding stream team on Twitch. We're called the Live Coders. So there's nearly 200 people, maybe even over 200 people now, all who do live coding on Twitch. And if you jump in to any of their streams, you end up learning so much. So I really encourage you just to get out there and learn and just follow along and see what's happening. But yeah, follow me on all the social medias and I'll see you in the Twitch chat afterwards.

Again, thank you to DevRel Conn, to the DevRel Khan Japan team and the broader DevRel Conn team. So much for having me here today, tonight, this morning, this evening, depending on where you're tuning in from. And also thank you to all you lovely viewers who have tuned in for this great session. Thank.