ep. 17 - first time speaking in barcelona, spain

We are back.

So back.

We're actually about to go on a pretty good run over the next, like, 4 weeks. So we're at the Nashville airport now, heading to Barcelona to speak at Spring.io, which is a leading Java conference in Europe. And it's my second time actually being accepted here. I got accepted 4 years ago. Had some things come up where I couldn't attend. So excited to be actually back, and it's gonna be a hell of a time. All right, so we are in New York JFK. Haven't been to JFK before. Based off this, doesn't look near as nice as LaGuardia. So we got three hours layover. You know, I don't. You know, I tweeted this on the flight. I said AI this, MCP that. The fact that I can't have a good Wi-Fi experience on the plane, I got no work done. All I could do is like tweet, which I guess is technically work anyway. So I'm gonna go get some work done over the next 3 hours before we board to Barcelona. So let's go get some food and food. Yeah, let's go. Yeah, I'm in the airport in New York about to head to Barcelona, go speak. Getting a little work in before heading to Barcelona right now. One thing we're doing is at Torque and helping the Ronstadt Group is like create these customizable hiring pipelines and It's a lot of buzzwords, but basically we have an insurance group that needs to find and create a hiring pipeline for Guidewire talent. Now, Guidewire, for whoever's watching this, my mom, my wife, whoever, it's just a platform, it's a platform language mainly used in the insurance space. And so one thing that we're doing at Torc is responsible for growing that basically customer base, finding those individuals, and then basically making sure their profiles are completed 70% of the way, make sure they get an assessment. So that way when we start getting job opportunities, we can move faster on the back end, right? We do the same thing for another large insurance client in this space where they need like .NET and Angular, Java and Angular talent. So like we get all of those people on our platform, make sure their profile is complete, make sure they've taken the assessments, and then when the company needs to hire from us, everything moves so much faster. So working on that right now. Before heading to Barcelona. Pretty sweet view. Yeah, we're here. Hey, we're two for two checking in at like the butt crack of dawn for international flights. So I love it. Signed up for Catalina, Catalona. Kind of a little wine mixer. Rewards paid off. I feel like I need a nap. Tired. My body's like, we're here. Yeah, I'm gonna try laying down for a bit. Yeah, I know. I'm tired. All right, so we took a 2-hour nap. That was not planned. I was on my computer, I put my head down, and I was like, ah, forget it, we're just gonna sleep. Slept through Patrick's alarm, uh, but first things first, found the cold brew. If there's anything about me at a conference, I gotta find the cold brew. So Moro Coffee in Barcelona, fantastic cold brew. Now we're getting some focaccia. We're gonna plan out the afternoon, probably do some work today, catch up, wrap my head around things to do, see, maybe throw a little meetup. Gonna plan that. And I mean, just excited to be here. The weather's amazing. And I think that nap is gonna help us probably get through the day. Because right now it is—

4 AM.

4 AM. Nashville time. We made it, Bruno Casanovas. You will never watch this vlog, but I'm here because of your vlog. We got it. We got it. Finally, make a vlog.

It works.

If you travel, move your body.

You'll feel better.

How's that sandwich? Oh God! Oh God! I'm in a way better spot now than I was this morning, but I'm starting to get pretty tired. We just, we just inhaled an entire dinner tapas in like 22 minutes. So head back to the hotel. It's also 9 o'clock, 9:15. One, I'm outside past 8 is wild. Two, I'm not in bed at 9 is crazy too.

But it's like we were Patrick and I, we were just talking about coffee shops.

Don't even open till eight thirty here. Like, what the heck am I going to do? So we just gonna sleep in tomorrow and got some adventuring to do. And we start conference activities tomorrow night with speaker dare at Savo House. It's gonna be good. Time to go to bed. Need to pay for need to pay for my food later. Day two of Barcelona. Worked for a few hours by the beach. Incredible. The fact I like worked by the beach in May and did not sweat at all. I love European summers or spring. I don't know. Anyways. Getting an Uber, we're headed back to the hotel, charge all of our gear, and then heading to speaker, there's like the conference happy hour and then the speaker dinner. So we're doing that tonight, speaker dinner, Soho House, cannot wait. Speaker dinner was great, fantastic time. Got to shake Sergei's hand who runs the conference. Got to get the selfie with the great Dan Vega right here. It was good to see him. He and I have like crossed paths, it was wonderful to see him. Met some other great speaker friends, folks. So heading back to the hotel. It is 9:30 at night and the sun is still out, which is, I mean, it's not dark. It's kind of crazy. So I'm probably gonna get some more food with you, Patrick, 'cause I'm still hungry. They weren't passing out the food fast enough, so we have a problem. I'm still hungry. Anyways, let's go get some sleep. Talk tomorrow. Let's get it. Just had some coffee, still a little sluggish. I think we're gonna head back, check into the conference, kind of get the lay of the land. I saw on the conference app we had about like 87 people signed up for my talk today, which is pretty exciting. It's gonna be good. So let's go. Let's get the subway back that you will map because I don't map. It's the same thing. We just go backwards. Okay. All right. Quick story time. It's super cool to be here because when I started recruiting back in 2011, my very first, like, 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, this is a little bit of a pinch-me moment. So this is cool.

This is cool.

Created or not, right? It's kind of like a special— I think as developers, we're constantly looking for ways to improve our productivity. Heading back to hotel now. I'm going to kind of walk through the talk kind of mentally. You know, I have some GIFs in my slides. Yeah, I have some GIFs. Gonna go work the clicker, make sure it works good, make sure the GIFs work, and then come back here and get ready to throw down at 5:30. All right, so checking. So Spring.io uses Wova, the app, W-H-O-V-A. I use this for Black Men in Tech. a few, like a year or two ago. I've been actually engaging with like some of the attendees. You can ask like questions to your audience and stuff, and there are people already responding on like what they need help with. So I think it's gonna be a great talk. I'm excited. So we got T-minus 2 hours before the talk. Super, super pumped.

So.

Get you on the vlog. Gonna get you on the vlog.

Yeah.

We do introduction. Who are you? Yeah, I'm Sergio Almar, organizer of the Spring.io conference. Glad to have you this year. Finally, we made it happen. Yeah, made it happen. Sold out?

Sold out.

Yeah, every year selling out. Community is growing, so really happy to see that year after year. Lovely. So first off, again, thank you for showing up today. I am super grateful that you're here. I have kind of weaseled my way into tech conferences with it being a non-technical talk at a technical conference, which is great. Really, really great talk. One of my favorites of the day. Thank you, appreciate it. I'm already starting to get DMs from people. It's one DM, Oliver goes, Taylor, thank you for what has been sort of a wake-up call for me. I mean, for me, like, that's just so big. Like, 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 to roll in from the talk is just awesome.

So.

Met Brian on the Next Play community, so I just dropped into the chat. I was like, "Hey, who's who's here in Barcelona?" So Brian got back to me, and I think this is just like this is just what I talk about. Like just the power of shaking like one hand at a time. So Brian said he'd meet up, so wait on him to grab dinner and just great conversation. And I'm pumped. Hang with you. Of course, dude. Super random. It's like meeting new people. I know. So obviously I met you from Ben Lang. thing. It's like, what do you do? Like, talk about the power of community, because like, you— we met on that, but you're saying you have other stuff with community. So just run down kind of why you think community is so important.

Yeah, I mean, so we're in Barcelona right now. Part of the reason I moved here is because the community is here, and I just think that when you find people that you're aligned with, it's almost like— it's almost like meeting an old friend. Like, you could probably go apply for hundreds of jobs on a bunch of different job boards, but having the right relationship with a handful of people is probably better than that. I think companies should be community-focused because word of mouth and growth through community, so growth through people trusting other people, I think that's the best type of growth. If you see like an advertisement or somebody coming to tell you like, hey, buy this thing or be part of this thing, it's like, it's almost like it's being forced on you.

Yeah.

Versus community, it's almost like you're being pulled into it. You're being attracted to it. Yeah.

Last day in Barcelona. Last day, getting some rays in. Meetup day.

Meetup.

Yeah, yeah. So we got— I need to like remind people that there's a cap. I didn't think anybody was gonna really show up. But like no one's doing anything tonight. We already have 18 people registered, so I don't want to cause a ruckus at the hotel. But we're throwing just a little by the pool hangs tonight. Hopefully we can do it. I haven't even asked the hotel, so it should be interesting. I think everybody saw the JavaScript hype train still.

Yeah.

For throwing that together literally yesterday, like post about that, that was insane. So we just got back, 2 hours of meetup. It was, it was, I seem like a broken record at this point because I'm like, everything's great, everything's great. Everything is great. Like literally, everybody was asking about Torque and everybody was asking about like, oh, they're like, oh, this sounds great. Like this is the perfect solution to LinkedIn. I was telling them about the future plans of what we have. I was like, this is incredible. How do I get involved? I had multiple people come up to me and they were like, man, this meetup was so cool. I was able to meet more people at the meetup than I did the conference. I just think like— we kept it locked at 20. The reason why I kept it locked at 20 is because I wanted it to be a more intimate group and people could actually talk to each other. It worked. Multiple people were like, I met so many amazing people, had so many great conversations, and of course, like, the venue was incredible. So yeah, I mean, it just— people were so grateful, so thankful, um, and, uh, you know, the response for what we're trying to build at Torque, again, I mean, everybody was asking about it. So great event. Uh, now it's time to pack, maybe go get some focaccia one more time before we pack up and head to the States tomorrow. So this is maybe the last European trip trip, overseas trip for the year. I mean, we're gonna double, triple down on US for the rest of the year, which I'm super pumped about. But just an amazing time. Meetup last night was just such a great way to kind of wrap up the event. Thank you, Sergey, for inviting me. Thank you for Spring.io just for the amazing event. Met so many amazing people. Talk was amazing. You know, last night I got so much great feedback. So yeah, we're headed home and 2 weeks off and then Rend. So see you in Atlanta.