ep. 03 - my thoughts on building community and the future of torc.dev

That was such a great conversation with Clark Sell who runs that conference. Talked about community. Interesting. We're talking about how we're starting to see a trend of people wanting more intimate settings instead of the large settings. Not across the board, just in general. So that was a great conversation. I love talking to him. A little under 2 hours to Cincinnati. Starting to get bored.

It's been a long day.

Something I'm feeling. I'm wonderfully breathing. Rest in the rainfall. All right, so we are at where we at? Proud Hat doing some work. I haven't had lunch yet. It's like 1:18 in the afternoon Wednesday. I mean, look at this place. This is cool. This is the power of community. A guy used to work with at my last company posted about how I needed sourcers and recruiters in Latin America. He said that he has like 20+ resumes that he needs to share with me. Just the power of networking, man. The power of community. Again, like most of my career, I've just built based off the people I know and being kind to people. So I'm going to eat, sift through some resumes, helping my team on some LinkedIn recruiter stuff. Basically hold up here until 3:00 in the afternoon, then go check in the hotel, get some more work in, and then speaker dinner is tonight. That is not good. So, gotta love filming stuff. Obviously, Patrick, you're gonna see that I spilled my chai latte all over my laptop. I now am the proud owner of a new MacBook Air M3. So there we go, new laptop. On my way to check into the hotel. This trip's getting Expensive.

Tears fall from the sky, minding the hooligans, I think I'm losing it, hope you're along for the ride. Buckle the seatbelt, so many want me to crash and die. Who can I call when I need help? Juggling thuggin', depression and pride, sayin' it loud like Jay, rollin' the window down.

So the saga of my computer, trying to do an update on hotel Wi-Fi. Not ideal. 42 minutes. Anyways, I'm working on my talk on my cell phone. I'm trying to be productive here. Got an hour till the speaker dinner. Watching a really cool kind of— I like when creators analyze creators. So there's this guy, his name is Gosia Dolgan. That is a name. Gosia Dolgan. He is basically analyzing Minton New York. And he talks about just everything they're doing, which is what I want to try to embody for Torque. And it's crazy, one of the things he was just talking about is replying to every single comment, right? We talk about building community. People want to feel heard, and the way people feel heard and seen in today's, uh, like world online is by just responding to them. Like, I'm telling you, it's so incredibly powerful. So like watching all this stuff, taking notes to embody it with Torque, and this is the power of community, man. Um, my dear friend David, David G, who is in Brazil, he was the VP of Engineering at the last company I was at. He posted for me that I'm looking for 2 sourcers. He got 30 resumes from people in Latin America, so we are spinning up a Latin American sourcing team to help with our numbers, 'cause we have to hit 1,500 net new people onto our platform in Latin America a month as a key stat. We are very, very behind right now, and so one of the ways, my recruiting background is gonna hire sourcers to basically help scale up our numbers faster, get into communities down in the area. So I'm going to go through profiles right now. I created a survey to level playing field, help speed up the interview process. I created a Google Form, asked some basic questions that were important to me. Some things that are important to me is like, have you hosted a meetup?

Right?

We need these people to almost be— I'm basically trying to create developer relations people. I'm basically creating DevRel but for recruiters. And so like, you know, I want these people, I want to see their LinkedIn following. It's not terribly important, but I want to see if you have a following, right? I want to see if you have a brand presence. You know, I want to see You know, your engagement. I want to see if you've hosted a podcast before. I want to see how involved you are. So I actually created those questions on a Google Form as like a prescreen to kind of get through people faster. So I'm gonna go through those prescreen questions now. Also start working on my building a public newsletter version 2, whatever, episode 2, whatever you want to call it. So that's what I'm doing this evening. So let's get it. First off, the Discord. So we have a Discord. The Discord is the way for you to basically try to engage with people right now. You probably say like, Taylor, I'm not really like a Discord guy, right? Or gal. And that's fine, that's fine. You can just join torque.dev and you're just gonna get emails from us, right? Hey, how you doing? You know, hey, do you want to create your— you know, hey, you're missing some information on your profile, yada yada yada. Also, this black cable is pretty Sweet. So you do all that stuff, right? One of the things that I'm really big on is like, is I just don't want you to feel alone in your job search.

Yeah.

I feel like this job, again, it's like a culmination of like 4 years of experience of creating content. Because we're gonna house all my job search content on the Torque.dev platform. So to get it, you just gotta sign up. That's it. Torque.dev. Eventually we're gonna build the content on the Torque platform. So Torque.dev, you're gonna have content, you got, we're gonna have technical content and we're gonna have job search content.

So that's that.

Second thing, we have the Discord. If, if you're like a Discord Chatty Cathy like I am, come join, come hang out, talk with other techies. Third thing, we have our virtual meetups, virtual streams. Jason Torres is gonna be running a lot of virtual like AI panels, ServiceNow panels, SAP panels, right? All the, the hottest trends, whatever. Oh, we also have Discord hangs. We're gonna have weekly Friday Discord hangs where you can come hang out with us and the Torque community. So got a lot going on. This is what we gotta build out. It's exciting. We just again, I my whole thing is like welcome home. Like I want you to feel home here. Like I want you to be like you know what? Like even when I go out find a job or even when I get laid off, let's just say this. Like let's say I get laid off. Like you can be like well at least I have torque. At least I have the community at torque. Like that's my goal. That's my goal. It's gonna take a minute, so bear with me. I would love as many and all input as you want. To give, would accept it gladly. Good morning. It's conference day. Gotta get up. I got up a little early. I'm gonna get some iced coffee. Kind of have a slow start to my morning before I'm thrust into talking to people. So let's, uh, let's go wake up and get some coffee. A little tight squeeze. Yes, Parker. I'm excited for today. I'm excited to give my talk, Exposing the Interview Process. It's basically a rebrand of my Manifesto in Hiring, just talking about the hiring process, which is a rewrite of my very first talk, Recruiters Suck. Uh, excited for that. But yeah, Exposing the Interview Process at 10:20 today. Gonna be great. There's like 550 people here at Momentum, so shout out Michael Richardson and Kat and The crew just for putting together a heck of a conference. Can't wait. Yeah, let's get some coffee. Let's get some work done before I go talk. I know Patrick, my video guy, is gonna be so tired of skyline shots, but Patrick, we gotta, we gotta get this one too, man. We gotta get this one too. Look at this.

Look at this.

Here we go. Here we go. Ooh, look at that. Look at that. You want to say something? Something for the vlog? Something about like Momentum or something? I don't know. Yeah, uh, just so excited to be here today and, uh, love having Taylor in Cincinnati. Yeah, gonna be an amazing day at Momentum. There you go, there you go. I paid him to say that. All right, here we go. Yeah, we got a pretty full house, which is, uh, I'm very grateful for. Everybody scoot in. If you did not take a shower last night, that's on you. If you got coffee breath, I got some gum up here if you want some. I'm sure I have coffee breath. Finished my talk, then had to go review a speaker's talk, then just cram lunch down my throat, back to work until I have to review another talk at 3 o'clock. One thing Momentum does is they get the speakers, if you're open to it, to review and critique people's talks to get them to be better speakers. I tell you what, that was an incredible session. Momentum's incredible. They had like 550 people, only 4 talks going on, standing room only. Probably had close to 100 people in my talk today. Probably one of the best talks I've ever given. The energy was insane. We went long. We went like over an hour. Like people were rushing to get to their next session because they just stayed so long. So incredible talk. Again, exposing the interview process, a very open, honest conversation, a really Got the crowd asking questions. People were learning from each other. We were crowdsourcing answers. I didn't have to answer some of them because other people wanted to answer. So just a heck of a session. Again, Michael, Kat, and the team at Momentum Developer Conference, thank you so much for having me. That was a blast. Can't wait for the party tonight. It's time to go to the speaker room and get some work done. Just finished after-party for the conference. I learned that you can develop an entire mobile application using Elixir. So that's fun. Your boy's tired. I'm tired. Like I said, it's 7 o'clock, 8 to 7, 8 to 8. So crazy awesome time. Conversations at the after-party were fantastic. Got super technical, got some feedback on my talk. I think I got to work in some slides. People want some slides. So I'm gonna go ahead and work in some slides, but the feedback has just been unbelievable. A lot of people asking about torque and kind of what we're doing, what we're building. A lot of people love the idea of kind of what we're doing and what we're building. So excited to continue to share with others and keep building in public, and excited where this thing's heading. What's up, dude? Alrighty, we are Officially gone from Cincinnati into Kentucky. Fantastic morning. Met with my guy Noah Allen. He's been doing some video editing for me. He's pursuing a job as a junior developer. So it was great catching up with him, kind of what's going on in his life. And then I had a great call before I got on the road with a lady named Tricia. She's an SVP at Ronstadt. Really just talking about recruiting strategy. Again, this job kind of tickling the itch of my recruiting background in a way. So looking to hire a few people in the Latin American region. I have to go through about 15 profiles this afternoon when I get home from travel. ETA is going to be about 1 o'clock. So I'm going to dive into those this afternoon. Still kind of going through all the profiles, what I want, what I'm looking for. And so talked with Tricia just about future planning, getting job postings up. Again, Torque integrated with Ronstadt, so there's some back office stuff we talked about that's really boring. I'm not going to talk to you about here. But just overall recruiting strategy and building up a pipeline in these areas that we need, such as SAP, ServiceNow, Cisco, and Salesforce in Latin America. So heading home, I already gotta pee. Only been on the road for like 10 minutes. This is gonna be a disaster. Anyways, see y'all when we get back home to Nashville.

Let's go!