It would be great if you could expand the areas of expertise though. For example, I have significant expertise with cloud computing, EC2 deployment, scaling, MongoDB, but there's nowhere to mention this. I also have expertise deploying Rails in production, the different possible setups, etc. Just checking off "Rails" is a bit broad.
Thanks!
I'd like the hardcoded areas of expertise removed in favor of an autocomplete freeform box, much like Stack Overflow's tags box. For example, I'd like to put that I'm a Drupal expert and I'd like to look for node.js help, but neither of those are options.
I'm not sure a tagging system is the best option though. It's very flexible indeed but it's at the expense of the simplicity of checkboxes. Especially when many tags mean the same thing. eg: rails and rubyonrails.
Since "hacker" expertise is a limited scope, perhaps expanding from there is a better idea?
As far as the duplicate tags there a number of ways to correct this. First and most prominent is community editing. The other option is to tie tags together with a backend system - for example ruby-on-rails === rubyonrails === rails === RoR