building a community to 100M technologists - 2025 in review

Taylor. I've been sitting here recording for like 15 minutes. Have you really? You have not. That's amazing. 2025, we're back on the road. Let's do it. I'm trying to show us like in the lab, right? Actually doing the thing. Like, yeah, travel vlogs are great. It shows us in the community, shows us active, which I think is incredibly important, which most companies— I almost every company doesn't But I think there is something about like being in a conference room and you seeing like what conversations we're actually having behind the scenes. So excited for the next 48 hours. Hey, we're going to Amsterdam. Let's go. Like my whole thing is like welcome home. So our whole mantra is welcome home. We want this to be a place at Torque where you, even if you're on the job search or not, you can come and be like, hey, I have Torque, right? What I want to get to from a community perspective is if you get laid off in your job, you go, You know what? That's okay. I have the Torque community to go into, to learn, to network, and to potentially find my next opportunity. We kind of want to be like a like a failsafe type thing, so where you can kind of navigate the rest of your career very comfortably. Crazy! Holy smokes! There's so many people I see time and time again who just like don't know where to get started in their job search, and like for me, like this talk is exposing the interview process. So Yos, you're gonna see this in you know a few weeks. Later, but I think it's not gonna be exposing the interview process, it's gonna be exposing the job search process. So that's what the talk's gonna be on today. I'm gonna kind of just go back to my roots, just try to encourage people. I think people are scared, I think people are lonely, I think people just don't know where to start, where to begin. So that's what I'm gonna talk about today. We're just, we're just gonna rip the band-aid off and have a little fun with it over the next, over the next little, next hour or so. Good morning, my name is Taylor Desseyn. I'm very thankful to be here. This is my very first ever international speaking opportunity. So I'm grateful to be here, grateful for Yoss and DevWorld for having me. This is a dream come true. When it comes to developer marketing and building community with, with developers, you have to be where the developers are. This is one of the key things that I've built my entire career on, is like, hey, you got to be where the people are. The people are at these conferences. The people aren't necessarily gonna watch your ad unless it's a good ad, or people aren't necessarily gonna like engage on some Canva post. At the end of the day, they're going to engage with you because they see you actively trying to give back to the developer community, which is the thing that I've really put my entire career on, is going to meetups, going to conferences, being active, being engaged. Hold on, well, I love you from a distance. Don't let go, 'cause you're all that I'm missing. Really excited to launch our ambassador program. We're closing it up this week, so it's the end of March right now. We're gonna announce our ambassadors, really have people who are passionate about what we're doing. I mean, at the end of the day, we can't build this community. I think we have a pretty special community for Torque on like spreading the word basically of like building this amazing job search community. I mean, the feedback's been tremendous, so we want to spread the word with ambassador programs. Really, really exciting. Cannot wait for the next 6 months. It's gonna be a whirlwind. I'm very excited to be here today. Like I said, my name is Taylor Desseyn. I'm the VP of Global Community at Torque.dev. If you have not been by our booth, please do so. We are literally right there. We'd love to have you. In a nutshell, what we're trying to do at Torque is we're trying to be your home base in your career. So what that means is at the end of the day, not everybody can find a job through a talent staffing company like ourselves. So me and my team make sure that you are engaged, that we do things for you throughout your career. We do resume reviews, we do, you know, interview prep, we bring in experts to help guide you through the job search. Quick story time. It's super cool to be here because when I started recruiting back in 2011, my very first recruiting project was placing Java engineers for a telecom company in Denver. If you would have told 2011 Taylor that you would be speaking at the premier Java conference in Europe, it's just, it's like just a little bit of a pinch-me moment. So this is cool, this is cool. My whole goal for this talk is like kind of like a pep talk, like to basically say, hey, listen, the job search isn't scary. These are the tools to use. Have fun with it. Bring some energy, bring some noise, be fearless. And so, you know, the fact that the DMs are already starting Rolling from the talk is, is, is just awesome. Again, thank you all for coming out. Real quick, Torque.dev, for those of you who don't know who— what we do, we help people get jobs. We are a jobs platform. Think LinkedIn or Indeed. But the community team, me and Jason, Brianna Holmes, who helps run Render Marketing, is also on my team. Anything you hear from us from a communications standpoint is us. We have a very active community. We'd love to have you in the Discord, Torque.dev/discord. Everybody here is nice for the most part, and everybody here wants to network, right? I feel like one of the, one of the things I talk to folks the most is that they are scared to go up to a person, right? And so I want to empower everybody, really encourage everybody today. Like, everybody who's here, they want to be here, right? They want to talk to people. And here's the deal, I've talked with some folks and they're like, man, I really got to get my elevator pitch ready. And I was like, yeah, that's great, How long is the elevator pitch? Like 30 minutes? I'm not kidding, not kidding. I literally had somebody go, I got 30 minutes. I was like, is the elevator broken? Like, what are we doing? Pretty cool. Introducing Grammy-nominated, somebody who moved up to Nashville to do music, and now I'm at a tech conference to do TED. I'm introducing a Grammy-nominated artist, David Banner. Pretty cool. I remember recruiting Laravel back in like 2014, 2015, and to now like know a lot of the Laravel staff, you know, hung out briefly with Taylor Otwell last night and at the conference today, you know, it just again, just a pinch-me moment seeing where my career has gone from not knowing anybody at any of these companies to then, you know, sometimes speaking or just being entrenched with the companies like we are with Laravel. Just a really, really cool experience. Really cool. Torque is By community. Shout out to Danny and my guy Pat over here. Raise your hand, boys. Raise your hand. Those guys are very active in our Torque Discord. Yeah, give it up for them. Yeah, there you go. First off, this is really special. And the reason for that is because this time last year, Jason and I just pretty much got started at Torque with Brianna. We really— I mean, we didn't have a booth. We just like showed up. Really cool year later. To put up this event on Guild and have 18 people pack it out for people who are invested in this community. So like we're trying to do something that no company in in the staffing world, which is a massive industry, will can attest to it has ever done. And it starts with everybody here because if if if we don't have champions like you all here, this doesn't work. Like this it just does not work. And so literally for you all, thank you so much for being here. It means like it means if I If I did not, if I wasn't running off 4 and a half hours sleep, I'd probably be crying right now. But I, I, I don't know where I'm at right now. So again, thank you so much. Uh, dinner's on Tork. Eat, drink, have fun. Thank y'all so much. We love y'all. We appreciate it. Trying not to be nervous. Big day. It's a big day. I feel good. I feel good. I want to start this out by basically saying that, like, to not give up. I have submitted to all things I have got rejected after rejected after rejected after rejected after reject— that's 5. Last year I almost did not submit. Do not give up. You are one email away. You are one DM away. You are just one action away from changing the trajectory of your career. I just want to say, like, the folks in here are taking a chance on us early on, right? And like, we, we do not take it for granted. If we want to be community first, we have to be community first. We need people behind us who are championing us throughout basically everything we do, and the people in this room are the ones doing that. So again, thank you so much. It means the world to us. Again, just thank you. Like, I am humbled that you guys love what we're doing. The response over the last 48 hours has been just tremendous.