Hello Darkness My Old Friend w/DevRel Expert, Tessa Kriesel

Alrighty, so how's your office hours? Okay, cool. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning.

Such a good morning.

Good morning. It's Monday. Happy Monday. Excited to be here. Excited to hang out. It's gonna be great. Just got the YouTube notification that we're live. We are cooking with grease. Is it grease or bacon? I kept cooking— cooking with grease, cooking with fire. I don't know, one of the two.

Hubby just told me that we're supposed to be cooking with, with animal fat versus vegetable fats. It's not good for us. So cooking with bacon now.

Are we, are we, are we in the beef tallow side of things?

Yeah, right. Bacon, beef tallow, you know, whatever. Real butter.

Real buttered. 2 farmers here, kind of. Oh, did you see that post? Did you see that post that I posted that my wife— so my wife shoots, she's like in the ag industry for like commercial rebrands. And, um, she— so basically she's like a, she's like a low-key ag influencer to where like ag companies send her gear.

Oh man.

To our farm and she has to take pictures of it. And so There is a— she actually was like going through her company's like Instagram and there's literally a picture of me and my daughter. It's a massive like conference display at an agricultural convention center.

That's nice.

And like, literally it's like, hey, you know what? If community doesn't work out, I can always go into modeling for the ag space. Probably the least farmer, non-farmer there is.

Ag needs everything. So yeah, heck yeah, we should all be moving over to ag, bring some technology love over there.

Crazy story. So Vaco— and we'll get kicked off here in a second— Vaco, when I was at Vaco, one of our largest clients was an ag company in, um, Murray, Kentucky. They were originally called Ag Connections, and they were basically redeveloping, re-architecting these old systems All modern. And it was, I mean, millions and millions of dollars.

Yes.

Like, I think, I think ag, you know, it's funny, uh, it was that Commit Your Code, I think, potentially. They were like, who wants to work at a tech company now? And like nobody raised their hands. And I thought that was fascinating. Um, that is fascinating. Uh, and we get that, but hey, I think, I think ag's where it's at. Um, we got, we got people tuning in now. Ricardo, Taya, it's good to see you. Jason, Mark, um, Chris, Danny Thompson popping out. Hey man, you know what? Yeah, yeah. Jordan, it's good to see you. It's good to see you. Uh, but for those of you, good morning. Welcome to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Uh, we're, we're, we're doing a collab, Guidance Counselor 2.0 Built for Dev this morning.

Yeah.

Um, excited to hang out with my dear friend Tessa. Excited for this conversation. You know, it was interesting. I, I don't have any of this scripted. Um, and so I got on and I said, how you doing? And she started to, to communicate her feelings. I was like, you know what, stop. Let's just talk about this live because I think it's pretty applicable to everybody. So before we dive in, first and foremost, please say hey. We'd love to hear from you. Um, again, this is a networking platform. What I realized 5 years ago in March— I've been doing this thing— what I realized 5 years ago—

Wow.

Crazy, crazy. Half a decade streaming. Um, and, uh, basically what I realized is like Devs need a place to come together and network. Again, this is kind of what I'm doing with Torque at Scale. Like, we all have these streams. Like, my dear friend Brianna is literally going live right now. Go hop on hers if you're watching mine. She's going live with Cap, head of community for Vercel. And her stream—

Which will be in the Build for Devs hub later this week.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Her stream, Brianna's stream, is called IRL URL. So literally what she's doing is she's literally interviewing community members that have built big communities across the world. So, but anyways, we're doing these streams anyways. Please comment, say hey, engage, message them. That's why I tell people, if you've messaged every person in the chat, chat for 5 years and every single guest I've had for 5 years, you would literally have my network.

Boom, bam.

It's not hard. It's not hard. So please say hey. Second off, wanna give a shout out to obviously Torque. We'd love to have you join the platform. We got a ton of shit going on in the Discord. I mean, we're just all over the place, so please come join.

Super cool.

But then also shout out to Appwrite. I am an Appwrite hero. Jason's Appwrite hero. So if you wanna use them, use them. I'm probably the only technical, non-technical hero probably ever. So go check out Appwrite. And it was great. I was talking to Aditya, one of their DevRel people. He goes, you know what? He goes, do you code? I go, no. He goes, you know what we should do? He goes, we should get you to code our product because if you can do it, anybody could do it. And I was like, ooh, ooh, I like that. So I don't know, maybe Taylor learns how to code in 2025. Probably not. Kelly, it's good to see you. All right, so let's dive in. First and foremost, Tesla, let's give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there.

Oh man, who am I and what do I do? Okay, so Tessa Creasel here. I get my hands in a lot of stuff like egg and farming and a bunch of other really awesome stuff like that. But in my day-to-day, I am a developer expert and CEO at Build for Dev. I have tried so many titles over the last year, go-to-market strategist, developer program builder, like all the things. But at the end of the day, like it is DevRel at its essence and I build relationships with developers and I make sure that those programs that developer products put out there actually attract developers. Um, not these book a demo links. Come on. Um, so I do that in my day to day. I've been doing that for almost a year. And that is actually, uh, sort of the introduction into like where we started our conversation is like coming out of the last year of my business. I think I got laid off like next week last year ago. So I'm coming up on a year and yeah. Yeah. It's been a crazy year. So I'm going to leave it at that because we're going to pull out a bunch of other games.

Yeah. I think so. Yeah. So you're probably wondering. Um, and again, for those of you watching, Brianna Holmes, she just went live. I just got the email for, for Torque. So, so I don't know how it works, and we have 2 streams going live now on Torque, like, uh, YouTube. So, um, uh, uh, that's interesting. But all that being said, um, uh, you know, the title is Hello Darkness, My Old Friend, which obviously is a little bit of a song. We like that song.

Trolls, baby.

Yeah. All that being said, Um, let's talk about, uh, why that's titled, right? I got on the call and I said, I said, Tessa, how are you doing? And, uh, so yeah, tell me, how are you doing? What's up?

Yeah, how am I doing? I said I'm finally doing good after feeling like getting out of the darkness. Um, and, you know, hence the title that, you know, that we landed with here. But, uh, honestly, like, I started building my business after I got laid off, and like, I'm gonna tell y'all, like We I have been in a lot of conversations about neurodiversity, and so I want to be like yeah when I was just talking about this, but y'all weren't there, so I'm gonna just TLDR this. Lots of good conversations on sort of like neurodiversity and needing to be around friends and sort of feeling like this isolation, and then also like getting bored at jobs and having to sort of be like hey I'm done with that challenge is over I'm moving to the next thing. When I got laid off, like I was actually really sad because the challenge wasn't over, but I am definitely a like hey I see a challenge I want to accomplish it when I've accomplished. accomplished that and I've met those objectives, like, I'm usually ready to be like, ready for someone else to take over. Here you go. Here's my child. It's already fruitful and providing for things and, and, you know, living. Um, and so I was just sad. Like, I was sad because like the challenge wasn't over, you know. Um, and then started a business and did that in complete darkness, thinking that like, oh, I'm just gonna grind. I'm gonna grind. Like, I'm gonna just work really hard. I'm gonna do all these things and just sort of like expect things to come, I guess, in a sense. I knew that I didn't, but I think it was just a lot easier to isolate than it was to, like, be out in the open. So I was telling Taylor, and then this is kind of where he's like, okay, pause.

Yeah.

Commit Your Code was like— I went to Commit Your Code. Shout out to Danny Thompson. Awesome event in Dallas. So amazing. Please go this year. It's so good. I can't wait. But when I went there, I didn't realize how freaking sad I was until, like, I self-reflected and was like, holy crap, I needed to spend time with developers. Then that led into I need to start a stream. Shout out to you honestly for the idea of this daily rhythm. It just builds so quickly that way. So I started 99 Dev Problems on December 16th and now all of a sudden I'm like, wait, is it bright outside again even though it's gloomy? Is my office shiny? Do I feel positive again? Am I back?

Am I back? This is so bad.

Am I back?

Yeah.

And it's weird because I was there, but I wasn't there. So I'm going to digress on that. A lot of what I felt like is just like real, real, real just sad. A sad year.

Yeah, hard. I know we started to go down multiple different things around this, but I know, I know, you know, I, I kind of said, I joked that when I was at Vaco, I don't know how I got anything done because I was driving an hour and a half in the office in the morning. The way recruiting was back in the day was like you would do a lunch, a coffee, an in-person meeting. I'd be away from my computer, drive home an hour and a half, hour 45 with Nashville traffic, come home to family. And it's like, I joke that like, how do I get anything done? But even lately, I'm trying to find my— I'm trying to pull myself out of so much day to day. And I think, you know, Yeah. this stream's gonna be a little productivity hacking here and kind of more high-level theory type stuff. So Hopefully you'll enjoy it. But I mean, what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, like I agree. So I had Tejas on 99 Dev Problems on Friday. Tejas Kumar, super awesome guy. Definitely. Yeah, he's so awesome. But he gave me a really— well, first off, that episode is full of hacks. So if anyone's interested in that, check it out. But the thing that he shared with me that was so enlightening is that he does these intense— he will— first off, he starts his work between objective and defensive or sorry, offensive and defensive. Offensive being, oh, this is the stuff I love to do. This is my passion. And this is my, this is where I like get into it, right? Coding for him. For me, it's probably combo, right? But then like, sort of defensively is like writing back to emails, taking care of visas, you know, stupid things we don't want to do, like expense reports, right? Those are all defensive tasks. I know, right? DevRel and expense reports, whole, whole nightmare.

There's got to be a whole other business to that. There's got to be a business around it. There's got to be.

Yeah, we should build an AI agent. Let's come back to that, though. AI agent for DevRel expenses. OK, so coming back around. Anyways, he shared that. And so then he takes those offensive tasks, and he takes like 90 minutes where he just is in it, and nothing else is allowed to distract him. And I thought that was really, really amazing. Because when you start to think about sort of like getting in the, in the weeds, like, I was too busy working, but I shouldn't have been working so hard on the things I was working on, you know. And it's, so it's like this divide of defensive versus offensive feels like a better way to look at work so that you can get in it.

Yeah.

And then, you know, just Muster up the, the, like, gumption to go work on the things that just suck, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I think one of the things I've been trying to do, and I love productivity hacks, talk about productivity. I don't do it enough on this show, so I'm glad we're kind of heading down this route.

We're going to be everywhere.

I know. It's like, because it's the first time I'm working with offshore team, I do a lot of my morning— I do a lot of meetings in the morning. I used to do meetings in the afternoons, which is a huge shift for me.

Yep.

But now what I'm trying to do, especially trying to lead people in one-on-ones and then also my own tasks, it's like being incredibly diligent to like time block my calendar and trying to get fitness. And I think one other thing too, we talk about too, is like making time for yourself through all this as well, right? I joined back doing CrossFit. So one of the things I'm doing is, is I, I'm, I'm the 5:30 AM wake-up crew. I'm usually at my desk by 6:30, kind of starting to crush work. But I also, my, my last meeting of the day is at like 3, right?

Right.

3:30.

I love that.

Yes. What are you doing? How are you time blocking, especially trying to get out and trying to see the sunlight a little bit more?

Yeah, it's funny that you bring this up because, um, actually the last 4 weeks at our church they've been talking about like getting rid of the phone and how bad the phone is and how it's basically just filled with sin because we constantly go back to social media and we're comparing ourselves or we're getting distracted and not spending time with our kids, etc. So I just over a week ago deleted a bunch of stuff off of my phone. And so when it relates to this, I have realized that now sort of it's given me this productivity boost or sort of balance in my life. And so as I look at my day, I've got a little sliver in the morning where I'm hanging with family, but then I'm time blocking. So kind of back to what Tejas had shared. This week, actually, I'm going to start blocking out those offensive or those Those tasks I want to do, right? However they're positioned versus the other. Sorry, my brain kind of like started thinking directly down that path and I don't remember exactly.

No, I do the same thing. I say the same thing. So what are you doing? So for me, I try to do it daily. I know some people are like, I do all my meetings on Mondays.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

So like, what are you doing? Especially running your own business too has got to be a challenge.

It's such a challenge. Like I have no meeting Wednesdays, but there's like a, but there's a client that has a recurring meeting with a different agency that I join already. So it's like it goes down the drain. as soon as I bring a client in. But honestly, I work with my clients a lot directly. I'm not in their business because I don't want to get pulled into all the things, which is what fractional work is.

Sure.

But I'm in their business enough where I am getting brought into some of those interactions. And so I do have to work around my clients, which is a whole nightmare of a situation. Because when I've got multiple clients going on, it's like, okay, they've got this, they have this. And so I'm balancing that, but I have time blocks that are like, now these 90-minute chunks, right, that it's like, I'm gonna go get this work done. But the thing that I was just working on was like getting out of my desk, right? And so that was where I was going with the phone app. So thank you for reminding me. Coming back around was like, so exactly, it's like in the morning, right? Like it also was clear to me that like I wasn't spending time in the word and I wasn't spending time praying and doing the things I know and want to be doing.

Sure.

And so I reorganized essentially my day. And so it just started with like taking the things I want to do and bringing them into my calendar. And that's slowly been a progression over the last couple weeks.

Yeah.

Working out, absolutely a freaking hard nightmare. But I figured out that there's this kind of sweet spot where friends of mine are working out, my son wants to go work out, and it's right before school so he can shower. And so that's actually starting to get reintroduced because you and I did talk about that at Commit Your Code also. It was like, it's so hard to balance all the things, run a business, still maintain a network, Have actual friends, which I rarely and honestly don't honestly have, and stay healthy. That is nearly impossible. It is so much. It is.

It's so much. One of the things I'm doing from a phone perspective, it's interesting you brought that up. So I am, um, I am doing, uh, I'm trying to do no phones once the kids go down. So basically, like, wife and I, so basically from essentially the hours of like 8, 8 until 9 Like we talked about, like, fine, you know, we did talk about phones in bed. We're fine, we do it, we do that. But in terms of like actual time to hang out, like, yeah, you know, no screens basically for, you know, me and my wife from like 8 until we're in bed, right? So that's kind of something we do. I think that's really helped me a lot. I mean, one of the things that I struggle with is like, you know, I'm, I'm always jotting down things for work and stuff.

Same.

And what I've noticed is the more I can pull out of work, the more creative and the more ideas you can have, which is funny how that works, right? So, yep, you know, I, I, I, I've said this for a long time to keep myself accountable, but, but to me it's like, if, if you are too busy to at least get a workout— and when I say a workout, I mean just go and like move for 30 minutes.

Yeah, totally.

I mean, CrossFit's an hour with drive time, it's, it's a little bit more, but like—

Jump on a bike, go for a walk.

Yeah, jump on a bike, go, go for a walk. I mean, I think the big thing is, is if you find yourself not working out, you're too busy. You're just too busy. And I'm not prioritizing. Yeah. And I went through that, right? I'm trying again, like I said, I'm trying to take back my day.

Yep.

Which is, and maybe that could be the other title of this. This is like the title B of this is like take, taking back your day where it's like you have to bring back your life.

Yeah. Like I'm back in control. You're not letting just these like sort of bad habits start to like reaccumulate. You're not letting things get out of control, but it's easy, right? When like things get busy to be Like, oh yeah. Like for me, I'm like, okay, I'm going to automate all of my guests coming out of my livestream. Right. Well, okay. There's not an API for some of these tools and some things can't be automated. So then I sort of just like let it go. But then meanwhile, I'm still spending hours manually processing these things that I don't need to be doing.

Yeah.

So, and it's, it's just, it's like regrabbing onto like your life and like building the life that you want. Right. Like, and that's the whole, that was the whole point of starting my business was building the life that I wanted, working for the companies I wanted. And then I sort of just like kind of let that go. And it was like, no, the whole root of my job is hanging with developers. Why I've been in isolation? Makes no sense.

Well, and I think— and, and I like what Nick said here. I love training, but getting it done earlier— so I'm not an early in the day guy.

Yeah, I can't.

Yes, I just can't. I tried it, it burnt me out in the weirdest way possible.

That's crazy. See, I have to do it in the morning. I'm too tired in the afternoons.

Yeah, for me, I don't know, for me it just works. So again, this is why I like having difference in opinion here, especially around— totally, to me, because You got to figure out what works for yourself, but you've got to know it works.

Exactly, exactly. That is honestly— that is the key. Because like, so a few years ago I decided I was going to go on a weight loss journey. Like, I used to weigh like over 200 pounds. I was like pretty heavy, unhealthy, and it was really about just like losing weight to be healthy. There's nothing wrong with being overweight or, or weighing that, mind you. It was a personal choice. I was unhealthy. Um, and as I did that, I started realizing what my body likes and doesn't like. Again, this last year I've been eating all the trash things. I can't have corn, I can't have peanuts, I can't have gluten, and I've been eating it all like crazy because Peanut butter, and— but I feel like crap. So it's like, it's, it's like re-grabbing on to like what you want in life, you know, and just like setting those boundaries, which, oh my goodness, very hard.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm doing the same thing. I, I hired a nutritionist for a while. I'm at the point now where like I know what to do, so she's, she's just helping my wife now. But like, I have a bio journal and I plug in everything. One thing, one thing I've— I, Roselle, Hello, this feels like a crossover episode. Yeah, 100%. 100%.

Yeah, it kind of is. They're the same time.

Mine starts soon. So for me, it's like, like I've gotten pretty much rid of— and I'll tell you, Whoop— like, so my wife's been on my case. I mean, you know how husbands are, right? Wife's on your case. Stop, stop eating gluten, it's bad for you. Stop doing blah blah blah, all this stuff.

Yep.

The thing that has single-handedly transformed it— I can't— and this is— and it's a challenge for me on the road— I can't eat heavy at night. I just, I can't anymore. I literally can't. I've, I've learned that I don't drink anymore because of my Whoop. I may have a glass of rosé, which is what I— that's kind of like my weakness. I'll buy a glass. If I have any more than a glass, I'm done.

Um, I don't even drink really. If I do, it's just because it's a one-off, like, oh, I haven't— I, I just want a margarita because I like them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love a good margarita from time to time. So for me, but it's like It's, it's being aware and again, trying to take your day back, trying to take your health back.

Yes.

Which is incredibly important. Um, yep, Jalen comes in. It feels, it feels really hard to balance everything daily. I find myself in different eras. I think seasons—

I agree. I agree with that.

Is, is, is huge, right? Like, I'm in a season right now where I'm trying to take back my day because one thing that I consistently believe in is that we overworked ourselves during COVID Heck yes, we did.

We did.

And we have not been able to recalibrate since.

Honestly, I don't think it's COVID. I think it's just generally, and like, you can speak to this probably because like earlier being VACO, right? Versus sort of like tech. But honestly, I feel like, you know, like, gosh, let me start thinking of timeline in my head. When I was thinking about this, it was like 2016, 2017, 2018, like that kind of range. All of a sudden, like technology and this sort of sector became like this hustle culture. And it was like, go, go, go, go, go. Like we can't work fast enough. We can't make enough money. I think SaaS maybe. Maybe this is SaaS, right? Where it was just like everyone started working harder and it was this constant competition. And I think that COVID was like, bloop, it's time to reset. You can't do that anymore. You don't get to go out of the house and hustle. You're stuck inside. You're hanging with your family. Your kids are slowing you down. I think that it's actually this bigger, wider hustle culture that COVID was like, okay, let's change. And we did become efficient, but I think we found our Oh wait, we're resetting. Uh, we are hustling. We're gonna hustle even more because we're stuck at home. And I think life just like became super weird in how that hustle came about. I don't know. That's at least my hypothesis.

No, I mean, I firmly agree with that, you know, and I even find myself, um, I mean, I am still, again, I am like, I, I feel like my hands have been gripping to the steering wheel. And I feel like I'm like trimming back my fingers one by one right now. And like, I mean, even prime example, like, you know, this past Friday I had some personal appointments. I think I had like a dentist, uh, and then like, you know, but it was like a dentist. And then I was like, well, I had my Dads in Tech lunch scheduled. So then I was going— so that was like out of the office. And it's like, I canceled the Dads in Tech lunch because I was like, it was too much out of the office. But I'm kind of like Like, I probably should have kept it, and it's okay that I was out of the office a lot. I don't know, it's just kind of this— it's this tug of war right now that, that balance, I think.

And that's what I'm saying is like, I think that they're— okay, so here's actually, as I started, uh, thinking about it when you were replying, is like, I think it's about the money and like the blowing of the money, right? Like when I first got into big tech, I was like, why do we have catered lunches? Why is there Red Bull on tap? Why can I get these fancy bougie waters whenever I want? And now we're like seeing this like reset of like, whoa, okay. Hey, hold up, hold up, hold up. Turns out we can't just blow money for 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 years and then still become profitable companies. Right. There was so much like money being blown. So I think that's maybe a big part of like where my sort of hypothesis and thinking is coming in is that it's like, okay, we like went so fast and we spent so much money. It's like, how do we actually move fast now? But how do we not move fast, but move smart, like move super smart, you know. And so I think that's like the whole finger gripping, and like we all are realizing that it's like we have to reset, we have to rebalance, we have to reprioritize in order for us to like work smart versus like, you know, have all this money and all these opportunities and we're just hustling hard, you know. Yeah, it's different.

And I think going back to like, for me, I would highly recommend using a tool. Tessa introduced me to SavvyCal. Um, yeah, I know there's a lot out there. Cal.com. Honestly, I love SavvyCal because you can see, like, like when you book something, you can see how it overlays with your calendar, which is a complete game changer. Because like if I book on Calendly or cal.com, I gotta like pull up my calendar. I'm always like kind of seeing what works. But like, I am OCD when it comes to editing that. I've edited it, edited it, uh, like 16 times this year already.

Oh yeah. Yes, yes.

And like, and again, like, I, I think do what you got to do, but like, I also think like, you know, you can only book meetings with me at a certain time, right? Because like—

Yep, totally same way.

Yeah, I just think, I think it's— if you rely on a scheduling tool, I, I let it rip too much. I, I kept it open too much, and I was— I mean, I've been having 14 meetings a day.

It's just holy, I can't get nothing done in that world.

Like, that's right.

And so that's kind of the thing, um, where you're like a leader though, you know? Like, sometimes that's what leaders do is like you sit in meetings because you're bringing people together, you're building relationships, you're getting approval, you're making sure there's buy-in, and that, that, that means meetings.

Yeah, it's— yeah. So again, trying to balance it has been very interesting. I, I do want to talk about getting You know, I know last week was heavy community. Kenzie Dodds, Pauline, Taz, all community-based streams last week. Hell of a, hell of a stream last week. But like, you know, you talked about, you know, getting, you know, being in person. You've even talked, you know, backstage about potentially trying to build something in Waco.

Um, yeah.

I mean, talk about— which, by the way, I visited Waco once. It's a really beautiful, quaint little city.

Um, Super cute.

Talk about, again, I know we're beating a broken record, but I still feel like people just aren't getting why you need to be in person.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I will totally talk about that. So, you know, I think that yes, in person. I'm going to caveat this with anyone who feels like in person is so scary. There are, there's a virtual version, but it's, it's not the same. It's not 100% the same, right? You're going to get a 90% if you work really hard. But if you're an introvert and you don't want to go in person, you're not going to get a 90 out of a virtual because I can tell you right now, you're not going to put yourself out there in the same way if you're not willing to go to in person. So what this all boils down to is putting yourself out there. And that's actually what this whole sort of precedent is what my keynote is going to be at PHP Tech. So anyone who is into PHP, Laravel, whatever, you've got to check out PHP Tech this year. I will be keynoting there. But coming around to that, right, is like you got to hang out with your peers, like developers. One of the tweets that I posted at Commit Your Code, and it was casual. I say this sort of soapbox frequently, but I'm like, developers aren't antisocial. We only want to hang out with our peers or people who get us, right? Like, Taylor, you say you're not a developer, but you're like a by-extension developer because you understand us.

Yeah.

You spent time with us, you get to know us, and that's what we care about, right? We just don't want someone come— someone coming in and saying, here's my pitch, here's my crap, buy my stuff, join my thing, right? We want there to be this authentic relationship. And so oftentimes people think that developers are antisocial. We are not antisocial. We want to spend time with ourselves. And I think that was my reflection from last year is like, we can so easily just isolate, keep doing our thing. It's fine. There was nothing wrong fundamentally, right? I thought it was fine till I came out of the dark hole and was like, oh wait, wait a minute. I need my peers. So when you hang out with these folks in person, whether you're a developer or a non-developer, right? There's this, hey, how are you? Like, you know, who are you? Who do you spend your time with? Right? You're starting to get to know them. What do you do? And you're like, oh, you have a dog. I have a dog too. And all of a sudden you're like, Human, human that I like.

I like you. Yeah.

Even just this call, right? You and I came on here and we're like, Monday morning. Like, I could tell we were both sort of like in it. I'm pretty casual this morning, right? But it's like, no, wait, it's Taylor. It's like my friend, right? This is great. It's a conversation of things we want to talk about. And that's where that is deeply rooted. It's like finding your tribe, whether it's developers or whatever, because when you can get into that space and just like unveil and be like, hey, I've been living in darkness for a year. How are you? You know, it's like, it's a safe space. Like, it's a space where, like, you feel empowered, right?

Yeah.

You, like, feel that, like, yeah, you get it. You get it. But when it comes to developer events, absolutely. Whether it's virtual or in person, there has to be sort of this, like, face-to-face, let me take the gloves off. Let me tell you about myself. So it's like the roundtable conversations. It's like the one-on-one kind of chats. It's things, conversations like this where we're like, hey, friends out there, maybe you're not in the conversation, but you're in the chat and we're just unveiling everything. It builds the sense of community. And like, I am not going to say that necessarily— like, I'm going to talk about my faith and it doesn't relate to, to you, to folks, if they do not believe, and that's a-okay. My daughter has this book that's like, God had this beautiful plan and it was to create the Earth and to populate it with people so that they could love each other and live in community. And so whether you believe that religiously or whether you believe that—

Yeah.

Because we are humans and we do need We have to bring back community, and that means like bringing people together. So like yes, I want to bring tech people together locally in Waco. Heck, you know what I want to do? I want to bring farm people together so I can teach them technology. Like there's just so much that we should and could be doing in our local community to make us feel less dark and isolated, and we just continue to keep sitting at our desks, hiding in our offices, hiding behind our computer screens, and and sitting on our phones instead. of engaging.

Yeah, that'll preach. Um, you know, that was a lot. No, I love it. No, I love it. I, I think, um, you know, I— so I was in— so I flew to Tampa last week. It was kind of a super last-minute guys trip. It was the 2 guys— it was the 2 guys with Unicorn Finders that I used to do the live show with at Bayco. And, um, very cool. Basically, um, we worked out of the the, the Tampa office for Vayco. And, um, it was really cool being in the office just around those guys and just how much— like, it's just, it's really hard to explain. It is interesting. It's what RJ said. RJ goes, we need— totally. But I don't think, I don't think we need all day on site. Yeah, listen, this is a whole nother life. I've done live streams with this. I think if you're just gonna go in the office and be on Zooms, there's no point.

Totally.

I like, believe it or I liked it how we did it a little bit at Gun where like a division flew in. So like marketing flew in for 2 days for one quarter, sales flew in for 2 or 3 days the next quarter. I like that. So that way you're not on Zoom calls with your people.

Yep.

This is, this is a whole other thing. I don't think return office is very slipper slope. I don't think it's a good idea.

I think it's a horrible idea. I absolutely hate it. Like RTO, I, I will fight that fight. I am with you, RJ. I am so against it because you should let people work how they naturally work. If someone wants to work in the office, let them come to the office. If someone wants to work from home, then let them work at home, but create the space just like you're saying, Taylor.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. But I think too, like, I had a guy message me, and this is how simple it starts, right? How do you guys message me? There's a huge Nash Dev Slack channel. It's like, that's cool, 20,000 people on it, and it's basically anybody in Nashville. I did not start Um, it's been around for years.

That's amazing.

And basically one guy, one guy messaged me, he goes, hey, trying to do what you're doing. I wanna start like a, just a low-key hang. And he goes, I like hamburgers, so I wanna do like a Nashville Deaf hamburger meetup. He goes, do you have any advice? I said, just start. I said, you'll probably have one other person show up for a long time. But I said, just stay at it. And I think it's fun stuff like that. And I think that's what more people need. I, I think social clubs, and this is kind of goes into more like enterprise marketing and community the way I'm viewing things, like I think, and again I pull a lot of stuff out of the fashion industry, but there, but like these clubs, like I, I think there's going to be more, like prime example, I think Pie in the Sky, I think we could have a Torque club. Like it would basically be like, hey, we, we have a Torque office, uh, location in Brazil You go there, it's like a WeWork, but it's much vibier. It's kind of a mix between WeWork and SoHo House, right? And I think there is a need, and I think businesses could do this if they have the money to invest, but basically create these hubs where then other people in the community— I'll never forget Gary Vaynerchuk said this years ago, and it's always stuck out of my mind. I pitched this to Vayco. I was like, why don't we just open up our offices for people to come in and work?

Yep.

Now I was told because of security stuff, which I get, that I get, yeah, you can't just have anybody off the street coming in. But I think that was a great idea by Gary Vee, was just like, hey, let's just have whatever communities wanna come in and use our office, they can literally just come in and hang out. And I think that's a brilliant idea. So just thought.

I, so I had some content and other stuff that I had put out there. There's a blog post on the Built for Devs Hub. So it's hub.builtfor.dev. And it's basically like how to do your developer marketing without a budget. It's a really great post. So no budget, developer marketing. And there's a little connotation or kind of commentary in there where I'm talking about how developer-curated channels are like so incredibly hot right now. And so when I say developer-curated, right, we can talk about non-technical and even just be talking about if you're a horse person, another horse person brings the club together, right? It's like, it's you and your peers and they're bringing that together. And that used to be what I saw in technology, you know, back in like when it, when SaaS became like just fire, right? That 2016 sort of— I mean, it's before then, but that for whatever year that, that year is just, or whatever reason that year is shining bright in my history. But Sure. Long story short, right? We had developer meetups and they were authentic. Developers were bringing them together. We were talking about challenges that we were solving, code that we were building. We want to build, other people want to do what they enjoy doing. And so when you bring together those little niche communities, that's the fire. That's how you find people. That's how you build networks. That's how you find your future users. That's how you expand anything, right? Like, Right. You have to bring the people that care about it. And I think more than anything, like, that's how I look at my work, right? Is when prospective companies come into me and they're like, we need to build a developer program. I'm like, we need to figure out exactly who your developers are and the channels that they spend time and how we can, by extension, be authentic in those channels and create net new channels that are going to let you shine bright while still letting those developers do what they wanna do. And it's like, that's what you're doing at Torque. That's what I'm doing at Built for Devs in our hub. We are bringing developers together around topics, around conversations, around meaningful things they actually give a crap about because it wants them to come and hang just like they come and hang in these streams.

100%. You know, it's an interesting comment by Pat and I saw somebody else tweet about it the other day about why businesses don't have on-premise childcare. I love that. Like, I posted this when I was at Vaco still. If Vaco had an onsite daycare, I would go into the office.

Dude, General Mills did. It was incredible. And I had just had my daughter. It was amazing. I would like—

Yeah, you want to get, you want to get your employees into the office?

Hell yeah.

Childcare and offer exactly healthy lunches.

Yep.

I'm not, I'm not saying, or even just a lunch stipend, you know, because again, I know planning it can be a lot if you don't have the ability to, but like, yeah, like, listen, just figure out what your people need, right?

Like, what's the culture in your team, right? Is, is daycare a problem? Then go down the street and find the daycare and be like, can I buy up all your spots so it's for our employees?

If churches can have childcare, why can't businesses have childcare?

Exactly, exactly. And I think, Pat, you're right on, right? It's like bringing— having an RTO or sort of forcing an office or any of that sentiment, it has to be based around those employees. Because more than anything, like, companies, they're trying to regain power. That's why they're laying people off. They're trying to regain what they need. They want those tax cuts. They want whatever businesses need to survive. Survive. And it's like, that's not what's in— what's in our best interest, right? And so we need to decide, like, what kind of companies are we going to work for? Are we going to take a stand right now so we see the companies we want in the future? Are we going to bend and we're going to go to RTO and put our kids in daycare? Dude, it snowed. This is really quick TL;DR to put— just put this light in someone's head about how powerful this is. We moved to Texas, we had a child now. So we're from Minnesota, we're used to snow. All of our kids have played in the snow except for our toddler. We got a very light dusting of snow the other day. I got to and play with my toddler for 15 minutes while the snow was melting, but still the very first time he got to play with snow. If I had to drive to Austin or Dallas or an office, I would have missed the first time my kid played with snow, and no company in the world is worth that to me. So that's my view. It's like, if you want to have employees around, do it around the employee. If someone doesn't have kids, let them freaking be your office culture, right? If someone wants to go home early because they want to pick their kid up from daycare every day, Great. They're still going to be on the computer. They're still going to do their job. It's just around the life that they want, which will make them happier.

A hundred percent. Yeah. And again, yeah. All this for sure. For sure. As we're wrapping up here, Tessa, because I blocked out to go make breakfast after this.

Oh, you gotta eat. I'm bad at not eating. That's my that's my guilty thing.

We're running off pure caffeine right now. What any last things? You want to plug anything going on Bill? Built for Dev. Any last words of wisdom, encouragement for the devs? Just kind of your last little bit of—

My little last little bit of magic. Yeah. Honestly, so Built for Devs is my business. I do developer relations. I help product companies develop their products. Essentially build products successfully for developers, right? So, Taylor popped in a link. I'm actually gonna be over in that hub right afterwards. Thank you for reminding me. I almost forgot Running an office hour. So if you go to that link, that will take you right over there. So you can come ask me questions, hang out. You can check out the hub. I have a developer network I've been building for over 15 years, and in my work building developer products and programs, I'm realizing that when I can bring different developers in, they can help the companies hugely. Like, your experience sucks, that SDK is horrible, your docs are worthless, and it's really liberating for both devs and for my clients. And so it's just this really beautiful place where like Darn it, we all need to be spending time together. So that's what we're doing. Um, so yeah, that's the shout out there. Uh, and come and find me in office hours. We can chat, ask me questions, whatever you're looking for. I'll be there for about an hour or so.

I love it. All right, rapid fire here. We're getting close to Valentine's. What's your, uh, what's your go-to, uh, candy? Like, if you— I know people like, I don't like candy. If you just had to pick a candy, like, like your go-to candy. Taz, like, I don't like candy. I was like, dude, just Just go with me here.

Okay, I'll go with you here too. So mine, I can only get at Easter time usually, although they're starting to expand. I like those little mini Cadbury eggs that are like hard shell with the chocolate in the middle. Freaking love those things. They brought them out at Christmas. I was like, oh yeah. So maybe Valentine's Day, Cadbury, bring out my little mini eggs. That's my candy. But I don't like candy or flowers, and honestly, I hate Valentine's Day. If my husband was like, hey, I got you a new milk cow, I'd be like, oh, how you doing? So that's, that's nothing.

So, who— I want to give a chance for you to give a shout out to somebody else. Who is doing really cool stuff in the dev community that you admire right now?

Oh my gosh, so many. But I think Aaron Francis, honestly. And I know that you absolutely adore him. I had the chance to—

Yeah, did you watch my vlog?

Yes, dude.

Creepy 1, Creepy 2.

All the man crushes.

You could see Aaron at the end of the vlog go, bro, please stop coming up to me.

No.

Which, by the way, he's on the show this week.

Oh my God, I love that. Well, folks, you gotta check that out. Honestly, so many folks, but I wanna say that Aaron, because he is building a business and we got to bond about how freaking hard it is to build a business. And so I'm gonna shout out to Aaron Francis because he is building a business. And so they've got TryHard Studios. They're building education programs for developers, a lot of video curation, but really trying to build out those educational programs. And I think it's a really cool niche offering. So shout out to him for many reasons. Yeah, I'm gonna leave it at that because otherwise I can keep going. All right.

Any interesting kind of tools, trends, frameworks, things that you're tinkering with right now?

Yeah. So I actually launched my newsletter today. So go to builtboard.dev and then click over to newsletter and you'll see a couple things in there that's going on that's pretty cool. But one thing that trends, AI, right? Everything's building, everyone's building with AI, everyone's coding with AI, everyone's trying AI. But here's the thing that's really cool. Tejas and I again, so shout out back to that 99Devs livestream from Friday. We talked about it and I, there's this thing that I do in my day-to-day work. I'm constantly doing developer experience audits where I'm like looking at their website, looking at their docs, looking at their brand presence, looking at their product, all the things, right? And he's like, yeah, you could get like an AI agent to like do that. And I was like, yes. So we talked about automating an AI agent to create and provide a developer experience sort of, and this is obviously on the external, not in productivity side.

Sure.

Benchmark or score. So any, if anyone thinks that that's just like super nifty and really cool, we're gonna start building that over in the hub. So yeah, I think that and just checking out sort of some of these AI tools. AgentQL is a past client of mine. So I just have to shout them out. It's like a web scraping tool, but it's more than that. And it allows you to spout out a lot of really cool data. So if you do want to, like use case, I created a recipes app and I wanted it to go scrape a recipe off of a website. It just went boom, scraped the recipe, popped it in JSON, copy pasted that into my recipes app and like boom. In a matter of no time, I had multiple recipes over them over in my app. So Agent QL is a cool developer product. I love that.

What's one big goal you have for yourself for 2025 for the business?

Ooh, to hire a head of dev rel and to hire a head of community. The head of community would lead and run my community and my events. Head of dev rel would work with my clients. So in order to bring on 2 people full time, that means my business needs to be flourishing more and I need to expand more into the enterprise and establish. startup space, which is what I have done with my services for the years. So I have changed that. So yeah, that's my big business goal.

I love it. What is one thing around the farm that you've enjoyed doing lately?

Oh my gosh. Honestly, planning. We are planning out exactly what we want to do. My husband has started a cattle AI business, artificial insemination, impregnating cows. We're realizing that farmers don't have technology. And so I want to kind of get back into spending some investment and time on that and getting a couple fresh milk cows and building out technology for farmers, honestly. If I could get away from big tech in say 5 years and be in farming tech, oh.

I think you could.

That'd be the sweet spot for sure. For sure. I just got to get the revenue rhythm going with my business so that I can step aside a little bit, let it run itself.

Longer sales times for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. But I think I would honestly, I'd probably completely shift, right? And just start a software company that's for agriculture or something.

So, yeah. All right, last question. Wrap up today. And again, thank y'all for tuning in. The comment section has been great. Real quick, tomorrow we have Brooke Sweetar on the show. She is a bootcamp grad that realized she needed to get out there more, and she has amassed 16,000 followers on LinkedIn because of her podcast. And putting out content. So we're gonna talk about that tomorrow. Um, and then of course the great Aaron Francis on Thursday. Last question, Tessa. As always, the show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but now as adults we don't really have a guidance counselor to turn to. If you could go back in time and tell Tessa anything, what would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Tessa?

Oh, that's deep. Um, oh gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh. Um, hmm, okay, this is actually going to be faith-related. I've been pretty faith-heavy today, sorry, but it's— the Holy Spirit is in me. Um, is that, uh, I struggled a lot in life, and I, I think I've constantly struggled with some sort of dark phases. And it's not dark, it's just isolating, right? I'm a— the way that I think, I'm a heavy thinker. Um, and I like code, right? And so I think I would have urged myself to realize that, like, we're here for a second. Like literally a microsecond in comparison to what Earth is, in comparison to what everything around us is. And just stop sweating the little stuff, right? And put all of my energy into my faith and being able to not worry and not get all caught up in what are the Joneses doing, what is someone else doing, and just really hyperfocus on what is your dream and what do you want to do?

Yeah.

And don't let anyone get in your way.

I love it. That's wonderful. All right, y'all. Yeah, great chat today. Tessa, stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. Y'all have a great one. We'll see y'all tomorrow morning, 9:30 AM Central. Peace.

Peace.