These days I have one IRC channel and one matrix channel with friends and people whose opinion I trust although I've never worked with them. I guess to be blunt

These days I have one IRC channel and one matrix channel with friends and people whose opinion I trust although I've never worked with them. I guess to be blunt you'd call it this "networking" thing, but in this case it's a network (haha) of people who've been in tech for 10-20 years as well and it's good enough to bounce abstract (or semi-concrete) ideas off, when your current team either has no experience or you deliberately want some external opinion. Not helpful as in easily reproducible, I guess.