I always had a hard time being social and friendly. When I first moved to the bay area, I forced myself to go to a lot of meet ups and progressively learned how to appear fairly friendly and engage with people. I recommend doing that instead of reading up "hacks"- you'll quickly pick up on what the most charismatic person in the room does to appear as such (or both, but those hacks lack a lot in subtlety- stuff like "repeating the last 3 words" sounds fake if you're not genuinely interested).<p>It's really a skill like learning a new programming language or playing the guitar- totally learnable with some efforts. I wish more socially challenged hackers realized that, cause it really helped me. (of course, my normal resting state is still highly introverted, but at least now i can fake it)