We developers are fantastic at making the seemingly impossible possible, but there's a stereotype about us which has been hard to shake off: that we're curmudgeonly old so-and-so's.

It's actually something which goes way back to the start of the computer revolution in the '60s and '70s. At MIT, the system administrators used to call users "lusers" (i.e., "users with a silent L"). But it's time to break that cycle, we're not those people, and our users deserve better.

In this talk, I am to walk through some of the key skills that I think all developers and technologists should aim to build up, and none of them are technical in nature at all.

Remember: it's never the user's fault.