ep. 11 - torc.dev takes on amsterdam

Hey, we're going to Amsterdam. Let's go. All right, we're in Dallas. We're not in Dallas, we're Detroit. Very excited about this. We're headed to Amsterdam. First international conference. Pretty pumped about it. Tired, which is Good. Patrick and I, we've been, we've been kind of brainstorming and trying to get the most sleep, so we both have our melatonins ready to go. Also, I want to give a shout out to Noct Gummies, N-O-K-T. I actually have a discount code, um, but, uh, gonna take those, gonna pass out on the flight and hit the ground running in Amsterdam. Got a crazy busy day tomorrow, already meeting with some people and Torque sponsoring a meetup, so there you go.

All right, Taylor, I know you're dying right now.

Yeah, 6:13 AM, recovering from this cold. Probably the 1 hour of sleep per my Whoop, I am 6% recovered, so today's gonna be a great day. I don't know, try to stay awake until this meetup tonight. So we're just gonna, you know, I'm gonna be a zombie. Honestly though, I really feel like, you know, how can you not be stoked about being like in Amsterdam? But I think your boy's gonna need maybe a nap, maybe like a 20-minute nap and a shower. That'll be good to go.

Yeah, I need a shower, man. I need a shower bad. I can smell you from here.

6:19, gotta get content first thing. We got a room. I'm gonna go to sleep. I'm so excited. Can't decide if I want to shower first, then get in bed, or get in bed.

Definitely get in bed.

Let's play through six.

We're in the land of no cold brew. Iced Americano. Picking out a place to go get breakfast. I'm gonna talk more about Next Play today. That's the meetup we're going to tonight. Basically, Ben Lang throws it or puts it on. And it's basically a Slack channel of like 1,100 people across the globe. I literally just asked, I was like, hey, is anybody doing anything in this community in Amsterdam? And somebody chimed in. They're like, hey, we're having an AI meetup on Tuesday. I said, great, let's have Torque sponsor it. So Torque's gonna be the primary sponsor of this meetup, which I'm pumped about. Busy day already. Drink up. We got here early. Shout out Greg for hooking us up. We're here at the offices where the Next Play meetup's happening here in about an hour and 45 minutes, but we got here to get some work done early. So shout out Greg. This is where it's happening. This is where we sit.

Pretty cool.

I'm pumped about this. You know, we all share the same experience, but then like, how do you keep that conversation going afterwards?

Yeah.

And I think the big thing that I feel like is missing is like the ability to connect with people after an event.

Yeah.

Right? So it's like, there's 55— however many people are going to be here tonight, I'm not going to be able to connect with all 55 people, but I want to, to keep in touch with them. So like, how do you develop those relationships afterwards is kind of an interesting problem to solve.

You always hear people talking about continuous engagement and how do we keep engaging people. And it's like, I don't think there's actually— that should be what you're aiming at. It's like you want to provide— you want to be there when they need you in that moment. But you don't necessarily need to keep trying to drag them back into somewhere. Because that's what your metric is.

Yeah, it's— yeah, exactly, exactly.

So how do you balance that in terms of just being the platform for bringing people together when they need it?

Yes, so our thing is, is like, my whole thing is like, welcome home. Yeah, 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 at 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 failsafe type thing, so where you can kind of navigate the rest of your career very comfortably.

What about for founders?

Developers, like, they love the Discord, they love all that, but like hiring managers, they're in meetings. They don't have time to be in the Discord. They don't have time to— so it's like, how do you— so like we're throwing I'm doing my first AI Builder panel, 3 AI founders. We're just gonna have a very open conversation, like, what's it like right now? What are you dealing with? Like, and my whole thing is like to just have a very honest and open conversation. I'm very raw, very, very raw. And, uh, and that's why I like to kind of do my panels and stuff. It's just like, hey, like, what are you struggling with? Like, let's talk about it. Everyone always talks about the highlights. What are you struggling with?

Yeah.

How can other people help you?

Yeah.

So basically what Torque is trying to do is we're basically trying create a better LinkedIn that's more focused on networking, uplifting others, not necessarily as much content, but more of like, hey, I want to go connect with the top 1% of AI engineers on Torque's platform. You'll be able to do that. Yeah, right. And so that's coming, um, which I'm pretty pumped about. But again, we went up there to Boston, um, and we documented the whole thing. We, we just put it out a week ago, and like the agency we use, like their head of marketing reached out to me and they were like, we've been— this has been on our roadmap forever. Can we please talk? I said, yeah, absolutely. So you can go find technical content wherever, but you can't go find like job search content, right? So like prime example, we did a live We have a monthly resume LinkedIn review session called Unghosted. It's like the opposite of being ghosted.

Yeah.

It's with me and my buddy Alicia Novin. He's a senior PM at Microsoft out in Seattle. And literally we went live last, last month and we literally got an email today. There's an individual who attended that took our notes and got a job because of it. Literally sent the email today. So like, that's the type of stuff we want to do. You know, one of the reasons why We do this vlog thing is that like to show people like, hey, we're slowly at this thing, right? I think people want to be a part of a story. You know, I think people are very tired of here's 6 ways to do this or here's 9 ways to do that. It's like, so for us, we just want to show it.

Now, of course, the summarized high-impact content is so easy for anybody to spew out now.

Right.

And to be honest, most of that doesn't hold a candle to what actually takes place in the real world.

So I get you, man.

I get you. Is this part of the vlog now?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every part of the vlog. From an AI perspective, it's really just like processes workflow. So I manage a team of 9 individuals across the globe. So obviously in meetings all day, yay, upper leadership. And then also have my own tasks internally that I want to help drive. I would love a way to like be able to take all my ideas, all the team's ideas, all the meetings, and like be able to like prioritize them somehow. And then it just kind of like happens to go into my Google Calendar. And it works. So that's one of the reasons why I'm here. I think having everyone stand and go around like that was just brilliant.

Yeah, I think it's like trying to get the right balance. Sometimes nice to have a speaker just to anchor the conversation.

Sure, yeah.

With this one, there's such a broad range of people.

Oh, it was great.

Really hard to kind of get everyone to—

Yeah, so I was like, this is good. If I throw something soon, I kind of like this. Like everybody share what are they dealing with.

Trying to keep it small groups as well. Normally it's like 20 people, so it's a bit more intimate.

Yeah, this is great, man. Take these. This is great. So it is 9:04 and it's not red out here because of where we're at. We're in front of the pizza. Patrick, you turn around. Voice is gone. I'm tired. I'm going to bed. Incredible, incredible day. Day 1 here in Amsterdam. I mean, we like hit the ground running. Shout out NextPlay. Yeah, shout out Greg. Shout out Maggie just for allowing Torque to sponsor that event. Meet so many amazing just entrepreneurs and founders in the AI space. But day 2 tomorrow. Got a lot of stuff planned, but your boy needs a nap, so I'm gonna go to bed.

9-hour nap.

Yeah, 9-hour nap. Good morning, Patrick. Voice still not 100%, as you can tell. Uh, it's okay. Hopefully it'll get better by Friday because that's when I speak. Uh, so today, coffee first thing. Got a ton of work I got to do. Uh, the Torque team, we just announced our ambassador program, uh, so there's a lot of follow-up to do there. A lot of follow-up from last night's meetup. I really want to be intentional. There were so many great people in the room, so I want to follow up with them. So probably heads down to work for a few hours this morning. Then we're gonna go in, have a lunch scheduled with an AI individual. AI, that's at lunch today. And then maybe, you know, maybe do some shopping. Private dinner tonight with some of the speakers here at the hotel, which I'm pumped about. Let's go get some coffee. So heading to lunch now with the AI consultant community builder here in Amsterdam. Really excited about it. Really excited about it. I mean, everybody right now, everybody I've been introduced to has just been amazing. So this connection, how community kind of builds on itself, and this was talked about last night about how like just getting in and networking is a compounding effect. So the woman Maggie, who basically hooked us up with the sponsorship last night at the Next Play event, she introduced me and, you know, he's a community builder. So now we're doing lunch, right? Just kind of compounds on itself. And I made a LinkedIn post today and I just think it's a surreal moment and I never forget like really where I came from because I remember like in Nashville when I moved to Nashville in 2011, like stepping into a meetup And like, I used to be scared to go to meetups, right? Like, I didn't know anybody. Like, I didn't know tech. I still don't know tech, right? And like, being able to like fly to Amsterdam and like drop into the city and get connected to a meetup community, and then now going to lunch with another individual who I was introduced to— I don't know, it's just crazy to think about just my journey and just really the power of community. Again, like, I always preach to developers, like, get a part of the Torque community, get Getting part of a community, but like I'm a part of other communities too. So again, shout out Next Play and Ben Link for his community. But off to do lunch and looking forward to another Americana.

So there's this AI community, Gen AI community. There's so many people now and that are like interested in it. Like you know.

Yeah.

Besides like the hardcore MLOps engineers, like 3, 4 years ago, there's this whole sort of like paradigm shift of, you know, the type of people that companies are looking for, right? So you often see now, all right, we wanna do something with GenAI, right? We need to have that, right? And I put these statements here, like, looking for MLOps engineering, NLP expert, LLM. So layer on layer on layer.

Right.

Yeah.

It's just words.

Yes. And acronyms. Yeah. Because, you know, the whole difference, like one of the fundamental differences is, you know, why I also started with AI Builders and stuff is now as a creative person, people create a person, you can iterate so quickly because formerly as an ML person, you have to grab the data.

Right.

Build a model, right? And then have a product, right? And then, you know, you're able to test it.

Sure.

Now the models are already there, right?

Right.

Yeah, you can just, you know, plug them into the API, right? Start playing around. But you immediately have a product, maybe a very thin wrapper, but you can start, like, you know, gathering data, trying out things. So the whole development cycle is kind of reversed, and it makes it so— I mean, it's great to have you know, solid ML skills. But it's not strictly necessary for everyone on the GenAI team to have that sort of technical background.

So, you can be— so, based on what you're saying, you can be like a non-technical— like, you can be technical, but like a not super nerdy technical and still be in the AI kind of—

Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, like the technical writers type, you know, the thinking Pseudocode, like, you know, make these like complex diagrams, yeah, the graphs, that sort of thing. If you can do that, you can build an application.

I didn't think about that. Yeah, that's a great example. Yeah, that's cool. So we just finished up lunch with Fausto. That was an incredible lunch, super nerdy around GenAI. I understood half the things he was saying, but let's be honest, that's like my entire career at this point. I understand half the things that are being said. But crazy conversation. Talked about like potentially he thinks software engineers are gonna be completely replaced in 5 years with how fast AI's moving. Pretty cool conversation. Talked about the importance of community. He's building an insane AI community in Europe, so probably gonna work more with him, which I'm pumped about. So yeah, Fausto, thank you again for having lunch with me. Appreciate it, man. And just such a great, great conversation. Also can't wait to highlight bits and pieces of that conversation on the blog. Thanks, Taylor.

You guys know who I am, right? Everybody knows who I am. My name is Angelo, and I am a member of the Talk community team. I've been with Talk— actually, I predate Taylor. Yeah, yeah, by almost a year. I've been with Talk since November of 2023, if I'm calculating correctly. My math is not very good. And It's the first time I've actually met Taylor in person also, so that's a real nice momentous occasion.

Angelos put together this dinner. We are hosting it, so there's no actual set speaker dinner for Dev World. So, you know, one of the things I like to do is like love on people and, you know, obviously make a memorable experience. I think one of the things that Angelos is very closely aligned on is like setting like really good experiences for people at restaurants that are like really cool and memorable like this.