[orzig]

Another "first step" place to practice social skills is in the Open Source Software community. It sounds like you (OP) are familiar with the technical part of coding broadly defined, so it's an opportunity to be 80% in your comfort zone while experimenting with a bunch of human interaction. I'm reminded of this because HN's front page currently has a nice guide to interacting in the OSS community: https://polite.technology/preview

You'll want to eventually graduate to things like body language, but if you get a little lucky you might be able to build some comfort with people through e.g. Github and then take another step into video chats and, if you're really lucky, in person someday. Even if the 'in person' people end up being different OSS people than you worked with digitally.