In 2020, the World Economic Forum identified ten skills needed in 2025:
Emotional or social intelligence is a person's ability to understand one's own and other people's emotions and to recognize intentions, motivations, and desires.
Soft skills can be considered a synonym of emotional intelligence, but this concept is narrower because it mainly applies to professional activities.
Soft skills are closely related to a person's personal qualities and are based on specific moral values.
Soft skills most often include the following ones:
Emotional intelligence can be thought of as two scales: “Understanding yourself and others” and “Managing yourself and others.” And this resonates with soft skills. That is, if you do not understand yourself, likely, you won't be able to understand someone. If you cannot manage yourself, it will be difficult for you to control others. But there are some exceptions; for example, some people do not understand their emotions very well, but they know other people's emotions.
Recently, companies in the field of human resources, which are active in social networks, blogs, and others, have published selections of soft skills, which are the most popular in their opinion. Therefore, they set specific trends that other recruiters and HR managers pick up. Some “fashionable trends” are created for specific software skills. And then the questions arise: What do you mean you can't communicate? How can you not want to be a leader? There must be something wrong with you.
Each person is unique, and it happens that your personal qualities do not allow you to follow these “fashionable trends” among soft skills. For example, when you see someone in a lovely outfit, buy the same one for yourself, but it doesn't suit you or “fit” your figure as it should. It is the same with soft skills.
Features of the nervous system are closely related to the development of specific soft skills. For example, such qualities as stress resistance or multitasking directly depend on the type of nervous system. And the type of nervous system is what a person is born with; You cannot change it. It is like fingerprints.
We cannot change the type of nervous system, but we can compensate for something and adapt to something. For example, if you have no sense of time, you immerse yourself in a task and forget about other things, then you can set reminders on your gadget or ask those around you to remind you that you need to finish. This is the case when the nervous system is relatively inert: it is difficult to "bestir yourself" and then "slow down".
If the nervous system is robust, then a person is resistant to long-term exposure to a stimulus, and we say that he is stress-resistant. And if you have a weak nervous system, and you get a job in a company where you have to endure a heavy load every day (for example, work related to communication with many people), then of course, soon you will want to leave this job.
Yes, it is possible to increase the strength of the nervous system to a certain extent, for example, by regularly arranging small stressful situations for yourself. But when something serious happens, the nervous system's power will "roll back to factory settings" again. That is, you need to understand whether it is worth developing stress resistance or finding a job with a suitable rhythm for you.
The nervous system can be balanced or unbalanced. We are talking about the ratio of excitation and inhibition of nervous processes. For example, a person instantly "catches fire"; that is, he does something quickly, and it is pretty tricky to slow him down.
Such people are considered impulsive and easy-going. And for them, monotonous, routine work will seem tedious and tiring. For example, this is work with documentation, with large arrays of information. And if a person with such an unbalanced nervous system takes a job in the field of sales, where he needs to communicate a lot and react quickly, then this will be the best option for him.
The mobility and inertia of the nervous system are about the speed of occurrence or cessation of excitation and inhibition of nervous processes. Here we are talking about workability - how quickly a person adapts and gets into his work or project. Think about yourself: how much time do you need to tackle a particular task? If you "bestir yourself" for a long time, then the mobility of your nervous system is low.
Not all soft skills are worth to be developed. For example, you see that it is now "fashionable" to be sociable or strive for leadership or to be stress-resistant and able to make quick decisions. But your type of nervous system is not designed for this.
Or you dream of working in a company whose philosophy and corporate culture are based precisely on the ability to be a leader, defend your opinions, convince others, and quickly respond to changes. Of course, you can try to improve the soft skills you need, but in the end, this violence against yourself can lead to emotional burnout.
It is essential to understand yourself to determine the type of your nervous system. And it would be best if you tried to develop only some possible soft skills.
You decide to develop some soft skills, for example, public speaking. What's next? From where to start? There is an opinion that the problem should not be solved at its level but at a higher level. Therefore, consider the following model suitable for individuals and companies.
Let's start from the bottom. We have an environment where we do things, and our abilities and skills determine our actions. At the next behavioral level, we talk about skills and habits. Further, abilities are what we have by nature, including the type of nervous system. Here soft skills are located. That is, our abilities influence our behavior, and behavior shapes our environment.
To understand whether we need this skill, it will take root in us and will bring benefits; it is necessary to determine what beliefs and values stand above it.
Our values can be filled with different beliefs. For example, a guy and a girl meet, and they share the belief that family is an essential part of life. But the guy is convinced that in the family, the woman should devote all her time to the family and be the "keeper of the hearth", and the girl is sure that the woman should be educated, earn well, move up the career ladder and, thus, be an excellent example for her children.
By the way, when employers and companies lead pages on social networks, design websites or advertise for personnel, they broadcast their values. And the company's values are determined by the business owner's values. And when you get to work at the company, you intuitively understand the prevailing values: for what you will be praised for and for what colleagues will look at you oddly. Adapting to each company with its values takes much work.
Therefore, it is worth looking for and choosing a company whose values are close to yours.
Let's return to the desire to develop public speaking. It is necessary to answer the question: why, in fact, do I need this soft skill? Why is this important to me? Next, supporting beliefs can come into play (for example, such thoughts that the ability to speak well will help me give lectures or make reports better) or those beliefs that limit you (for example, there is only chatter around, there is little benefit from them).
Our values and beliefs guide our skills and abilities. As we develop our skills and abilities, they influence our behavior, and behavior determines our environment.
People mostly understand what they like or dislike at the level of their environment, for example, where they live and work. They know what they need to do to change it (behavior) and what abilities they need to develop (soft skills).
Next, you must compare the soft skills you want to develop with your values. Imagine you already have this skill: how do you feel about that? Are you comfortable or not?
Laziness or procrastination is a normal protective reaction of our body, especially now, during a war. Its reasons can be:
What to do with it?
You can use self-organization and self-motivation techniques:
How to organize resting:
And the most crucial thing regarding soft skills and motivation: you should never fight with yourself; you should study yourself, understand and be able to negotiate with yourself.
See more in the video.
Not quite unusual for computer fonts, Times New Roman has been around since before computers became a thing. The British newspaper The Times commissioned it in 1931 as a retro update from a regular 19th-century font to something more solid with a strong 18th-century vibe. Old broom sure knows the corners (or so the saying goes), but you can see how the font may feel outdated in the 2020s.
It would not be a stretch to say Times New Roman looks ancient, as we already know it was designed this way. Even Roman in the name is a nod to the Italian school of printing from (15th century!). Seeing old-fashioned characters on a groundbreaking visual device, CRT screen, was weird enough. Now that we have modern LCD screens with much higher resolution and fidelity, a font capturing aesthetics from 300 years ago feels crystal odd.
Fonts classification is usually much more objective than old-fashioned or modern. One reason why Times New Roman may give an archaic vibe is that it is a serif font. All letters (or other characters) come with decorative lines, which range from very subtle to indeed something you would see in an 18th-century newspaper. Note how you can’t see any tails on the letters in this article—or almost any website created in the last 10 years.
Serif and Sans serif versions of Inria font from Black[Foundry]
Times New Roman, much like a lot of newspaper fonts, is rather narrow. It is a mostly business decision: you gotta fit in as much text on a page as possible—even during the times (ha-ha!) when the ratio of ads to stories was much lower. At the end of the day, all publications did that and it’s not like many people would’ve changed morning newspapers just because one is a bit easier to read than the rest.
Computers, however, do not have the same limitation. You don’t pay more for publishing an article or sending a document with much more reasonable line spacing and kerning than the average Victorian newspaper. If it’s the intermediary audience (e.g. client that commissioned an article) that needs to save costs, they can always change character size or pick a narrow font themselves.
Furthermore, the mobile boom is not helping narrow fonts like Times New Roman. Most devices connected to the internet now have a vertical layout. Trying to squeeze in extra characters on screens with little horizontal space will bring nothing but frustration for the reader. Interestingly, The Times had to adapt similarly in print: they had to create yet another Times New Roman-inspired typeface after moving from broadsheet to tabloid in 2004. These days, a narrow font is a compromise on usability that you don’t actually have to make—and people would appreciate it if you didn’t.
One could argue that a document in Times New Roman screams laziness or indifference. If the sender didn’t change the default option to something more balanced, it communicates that they either did not want to make your experience better or did not bother to do that. That kind of attitude does not help to secure a job or scholarship.
On the other hand, certain institutions would have you use nothing but Times New Roman. Some universities strongly encourage if not outright mandate the use of Times new Roman for papers, and so do scientific journals. Older government forms coming as templates to be filled out in Word would not play nice if you try to change the font. That being said, such restrictions are getting scarcer, especially with the rise of Mac. The OS and default office-like apps there have a default font different from Times New Roman (and a new one every few years at that).
The current default font on MacOS
Summing up, the cardinal sin of Times New Roman is defaulting to it without consideration. The font is a must in very few scenarios, but you see it much more often than that. Even Microsoft agrees something has to change: the default font for Word has been Calibri since 2007.
The above-mentioned Calibri is a spiritual successor to Times New Roman. It is now the default font for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. It is a sans serif font (no decorative lines) that looks perfectly fine on both screens and paper.
If you want to ditch the default and stay sleek, Georgia is a great option. It is a serif font but letter strokes are much more subtle than what you see with Times New Roman. Georgia does not look outdated and works better for vertical screens, as it is not too tight on the horizontal space.
Should you feel like going barebones, Helvetica is the right font. It is a sans serif font looking as bland as it gets—in a good way. Helvetica lacks elements that would make it look too modern, but it also has no archaic elements that would make the font too classic. I think we can trust Apple on that: they used a spin on Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, as the MacOS system font for two years.
Somehow, I felt a big future for tech when the Internet connection was provided in my dormitory
I'm from Kramatorsk, Donetsk region. I studied in Kharkiv and was supposed to become a radio-electronic engineer, but in 2001 I understood exactly what I wanted to do. It was the time when the Internet “appeared” in our dormitory. I liked what was happening there and felt a future was behind it. So I switched to web development. I bought some books, and for the next two years, I had the luxury of free time to study without having to work. 2003 I graduated from the university, and within one month, I found my first work as a PHP developer. I was the happiest junior developer who was paid for the work he liked. I remember my first salary — $250 transferred via Western Union from the USA — was like a fortune. Back then, there were no web developers among my friends. Compared to nowadays, it wasn't that hype. But for me, it was evident that this was a future. I told my friends that all the companies I knew would need a website or should be represented online somehow. And I wanted to be a part of this evolution.
Pink Floyd, my lifetime project, and three kids
I was always a fan of the music of the 70s, and Pink Floyd was my favorite band. But there was no website dedicated to Pink Floyd in Russian or Ukrainian. So I decided to do that on my own. I reached out to the person who did the official newsletters about Pink Floyd to help me with that, and long story short — I made a website, and it turned18 recently. This fan website is the most extended project in my life, but I switched it off because I didn’t want to contribute to the Russian-speaking community anymore. The most crucial thing is the following. Remember I mentioned that person who worked on the official newsletters about Pink Floyd? She is currently my wife, and we are bringing up two kids. We used to make jokes that we actually had three kids — our first one was the Pink Floyd website.
From a web developer to a start-up founder
After two years of work in Moscow, I was back in Kyiv. I didn't like living in Russia, so moving back to Ukraine was obvious. At this time, I stepped out of web development, and in 2007 I started my own business. All went well, but the political regime of Yanukovych reminded me of Russia, so we decided to move to Poland and work remotely. Since 2014, when the war started, it has been impossible to run my business in Ukraine.
And after a 7-year break in web development, a dozen hours of upskilling, and 60 interviews, I have found a new job in Berlin as a senior back-end developer. Now in 2022, I'm a co-founder of the tech startup countX, and all my engineering team is from Ukraine.
How I met Beetroot Academy
It was a coincidence and proof that networking rules. One of my colleagues, Alex, also works as a teacher at Beetroot Academy, so I've heard a lot about this online school. When Alex introduced me to Dmytro, CEO of Beetroot Academy, I was ready to start our partnership. He told me about the fundraising campaign on a mission to help Ukrainian people affected by the war start a new career in tech. So I couldn't stay away from it and donated for scholarships — the less I could do in these challenging times. Now seven women from Donetsk and Luhansk regions are studying at Beetroot Academy, and I’m happy to be their mentor.
Why I support tech education for Ukrainians
Ukrainians, especially men who are out of the country, live with the feeling of guilt. My life is safe, but my three classmates are now fighting against Russia, risking their lives. People try to find their own way to help Ukrainians win this war, overcome the consequences and rebuild the country. So do I.
I already had an idea of investing in tech education. That is where I can contribute as a professional and entrepreneur, so I chose to support the future of Ukraine this way. Many Ukrainians affected by war want to enter the tech industry and need an opportunity to do that. Tech education is one of the most impactful and cost-effective ways to help Ukrainians restore their lives and fight poverty after the war ends. I believe our country will be the next tech cluster after Silicon Valley in the USA and Bengaluru in India. Moreover, I want many Ukrainians to be a part of that success story. I contribute to it by donating for scholarships and would like to encourage others to support Beetroots Academy’s mission.
Imagine a house. To have it running steadily, there should be a good foundation, building blocks, proper infrastructure, good furniture, designs, and usability functions. In web development, the front-end developer is somewhere in between the processes as he takes the ideas from the UI\UX team to turn them into clickable websites that work. Back-end developers, PMs, and QAs take care of the other vital parts, such as proper foundation, team and project management, and testing.
So there's actually a front-end and back-end. We won't say which one is easier. Let's just leave one picture here for your understanding.
To light up a room, you have to click the button. Ensuring it is clickable is a job for a front-end developer; ensuring there is a light is a task for a back-end developer. Front-end web development is the art of using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a set of other tools for a website/app for a user to see and interact with them.
Basic front-end development glossary
In front-end web development, there are vital terms you should know. We bet you've heard most of them, so let's just keep them handy in the list below.
Programming languages or codes
For example, HTML
In development, you need to speak a language everyone understands — your machine, your code compiler, your user, and your project manager. Below are just a couple of languages we use in the front-end. They look different to everyone, but mean the same and help achieve the result — have the webpage ready and running.
HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is the code developers use to structure a webpage. Remember seeing a webpage made up of blocks, paragraphs, or tables? HTML helps with that. It originates from a code developed by WHATWG some 30 years ago, in 1993.
JavaScript, conveniently referred to as JS, is a programming language considered one of the cores for front-end development. Designed over 26 years ago, it is now used in almost every webpage you see. Even on the Beetroot Academy website, too :) JS is used to create animation, control multimedia, and generally work with dynamically updating content, buttons, banners, etc.
Here, you can also look at some Javascript libraries — jQuery, React.js, and more here on Kinsta, for example.
Front-end development tools
Git, Google Fonts, W3C, and more
Compilers, linkers, code editors are essential for every front-end developer. These are basic tools that you will use in your daily routine — as home technicians use multitools for repairing the leakage, for example.
To name a few, there are Google Fonts to help you work with fonts, W3C Markup Validation Service to validate your code, and many more.
Version control tools are also part of the list here, used for monitoring changes to your code. We guess you strive to make your code better and better each time. Hence, version controls will help manage the evolution of your code as it becomes clearer and more effective. Git is the most popular, and it's open and free of charge.
Design principles in front-end
In front-end development, we use responsive design to ensure our content fits every (or almost every) gadget and looks good on it. Recall how you open a webpage on your iPhone, reopen it on your laptop, and send it to granny's email — and it still looks good on your grandparents' old-fashioned computer? That's responsive design in action.
Design automatically adapts to given dimensions, so all users feel comfortable interacting with the content. The feeling is the key here — because the front-end is mostly about what the user feels while using your web piece.
CSS, closely connected to HTML, is a code used actually to style an HTML doc. It has everything to do with the colors, styles, and other properties.
Looks quite interesting, huh? Now that you're familiar with the basic front-end development glossary, it's high time to learn the front-end. We hope you find this glossary helpful, no matter which tech direction you will choose. Keep it in your saved links to come back once in a while.
Join our next group in May and start learning with tech industry experts to gain knowledge you need to work as a junior front-end developer.
While such languages as Python and PHP have existed for quite a long time, C# is regarded as a young programming language. Danish software engineer Anders Hejlsberg developed it in the year 2000. Today, he still works for Microsoft as the lead architect of C#. Anders Hejlsberg is also known for being the chief architect of Delphi and the original author of Turbo Pascal.
C# was originally named COOL, whereby the acronym stood for “C-like object-oriented language”. Alas, Microsoft could not hang onto this “cool name” because of trademark law.
C# is pronounced, “see sharp”. The name was taken from the musical notation, whereby a sharp symbol points that the written note should be played a semitone higher. The “sharp” suffix has been used by several other .NET languages that are editions of present languages, including J#, A#, and the functional programming language F#.
The base syntax of the C# is similar to C-style languages such as C, C++, and Java. This programming language most directly represents the underlying Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).
If you plan to create apps for the Microsoft platform, you should definitely learn C#. The developers favor this language for being easy to use and well-designed. Also, it is often recommended programming language to use when creating games through the Unity Game engine.
C# used for:
A list of programs and applications written in C# includes Microsoft Visual Studio, Paint.NET, Windows Installer XML, Open Dental, FlashDevelop, KeePass, NMath, Pinta, Banshee, OpenRA.
Here are a few reasons to work with this particular programming language:
The future looks bright for C# because of its popularity, versatility, and existing creations. If you want to have a solid foundation to become a master developer, you should learn this “cool” programming language.
