How to Navigate Large Conferences w/Nick Taylor, Dev Advocate

Um, yeah, so I think with when it comes like the dads and tech stuff, I think so. A buddy of mine, he did my welcome home video and he runs creative and community for Freaks of Nature. Freaks of Nature is a D2C brand. It's a sunscreen brand. Um, I don't know who this is. Kelly Slater is like the big thing.

Yeah, he's a surfer. Yeah.

And so like, it's like amazing job he has. He flies out to like, he was in Hawaii.

Okay.

Shooting a surfing, shooting surfing content for a week. I'm like, oh, that stinks.

Yeah.

So basically he told me something that I think this is what I wanna do with Dads and Tech is like, you, you like, you just wanna give people a starting line. And I just think that like really resonated with me so much, just like, just giving people a starting point. I think it's huge.

No, totally, totally. Yeah, it's saying the obvious here, but community, the people are what make the community. It's not the people's— you obviously need people starting the community and you do need moderation and stuff, but it's really hard to scale a very large community. For example, when I worked at Dev.to, by the time I left, we had a million active members. That's a crap ton of people.

That's crazy.

Hey, what's up, Jason? We had a moderation team, but it was like, when I left there, I think it was 4 people. The only way we were able to scale moderation was there was some automations, a lot of it was people in the community, like people like, uh, I don't know if Jeff Jesse's in the chat yet, but like there's a lot of people that— and including myself, even when I left, I stayed as a moderator because I cared about the community, you know. And it's, it's just really hard to moderate all that, you know. But yeah, but, but it's really the people that, that make it and, and build it, you know.

Oh, 100%. It's—

you're just kind of like, you're just kind of like Starting the fire. That's it, you know. So yeah, yeah, right now.

Yeah, it's 100%. It's 100% the people. Oh, there he is, there he is, there he is, there he is. I mean, shout out Jeff Jesse, dude.

I—

you're a G, man. I mean, you know, you're, you're making the Torque community— I mean, Jeff's out there welcoming people into the Torque community. Yeah. Um, Jeff, you are going to get our first batch of merch, by the way. The swag for Torque Is going to be insane. Like, I got the second revisions of the torch. Shout out Isaac. We're using, um, uh, uh, uh, Zara Isaac on Twitter.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Over in, over in, um, Africa. Nigeria, I think, is where he's based out of. Yeah. And dude, the— like, our goal is to get it completely done. I'm gonna try to get something, um, uh, rushed for us Rush for me for Amsterdam because the hoodies are sick. I mean, they're sick. So yeah.

Okay. So that's where you're going. It's Amsterdam. I'm going to London.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Real quick. Good morning, everybody.

Happy birthday.

But basically, so I think starting out these things is a little awkward because it's like, it takes like a few minutes for people to tune in. And so like Nick and I were just like kind of dive diving in the community and we were talking about dads in tech and Nick's like, man, we're just like talking about a lot of good shit. Like we should probably go live. So We just went live, so good morning, happy Wednesday. It's good to see you all. I'm dragging this morning. Had beer league hockey last night. We lost again, we're on a 3-game losing streak. Uh, Lower A has gotten very competitive and we just can't put pucks in the back of the net. So we lost last night, uh, 6 to— 6 to 4, unfortunately. And I didn't go to bed till about 1 AM last night, so, um, dragging a little bit this morning, but nothing but a little cold brew and some Zens won't help.

Yeah, totally.

But good morning. Please say hey. We'd love to hear from you. I'm excited for this conversation. First off, I want to apologize to Nick publicly because Nick is an amazing individual. I've admired what he's done from afar, his streams, his engagement. He's always there. I actually tell people this. I said, the people who I consider my friends, I actually do the worst job of inviting people onto the show. Because I'm like, oh, I know them. We have great conversations. I respect them. I don't think to invite them. So a lot of— I've had some people, Nick has not done this, but I've had some people in the chats go like, hey, why haven't you invited me? I'm like, oh shit, I'm so sorry. There's no hard— it's just because I know you, so I don't think about it. So this is a long time coming.

Yeah.

So I'm happy to have Nick on the show. I think this topic's gonna be very applicable to a lot of people. I'm headed to Dev World. In 2 weeks in Amsterdam. Nick, where are you heading again?

Yeah, I'm heading to London, uh, April 1st to, uh, KubeCon Europe. So it's, uh, and it's, uh, we'll get into our comps, but it's, it's massive. Like, I've been to Render, which I went to Render in 2023. Yeah, I can't remember how big it was in 2023. I feel like it was like 3,000 maybe.

Yeah. Um, They hit 5,000 this past year.

Yeah, that's wild. But this is the first time I'm going to KubeCon because I'm still in the web dev community, but where I'm working at now, it's more security infra. So I'm about to meet a bunch of new friends and—

About to meet a bunch of nerds.

Let's just be honest. Yeah, it's all good.

It's very different. I mean that the best way possible.

All I'll say is I'm a bit of a nerd too, because like even like one of the guys I played rugby with, like when we go on vacation together sometimes, like we'll be on the beach and I'll be reading a programming book and he'll be— he's like, he's a good friend of mine, but he's like, are you reading one of those nerd books? And I'm like, yes, yes, I am.

Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. I love that. Um, so yeah, we're gonna talk about that today. Uh, um, but again, kind of, kind of some few shoutouts real quick as always. First off, shout out Torque. Listen, we hire people too, right? I think one of the things I'm gonna start doing, I was listening to a marketing podcast yesterday. I'm gonna try to do one video a day for 30 business days on basically what Torque is. I'm gonna release, I'm gonna do one today.

Okay.

But we do hire and we help hire a ton of people around the globe. So if you need engineering help, I think what's really cool about this is my last companies were just kind of more US-based. We can literally help scale teams anywhere because we also have the power of Ronstadt Global to be able to do that. So really, really cool. So shout out Torque. Also want to shout out to Appwrite.io. I'm an Appwrite hero. Jason's an Appwrite hero. We're looking to do some cool stuff with them. I have some Appwrite heroes coming on the show here soon. So shout out to them. I love their product, love their team. They're doing a lot of good stuff. Let's see. I want to give a shout out. Oh, also too, if you want to check out everything we're— shout out Jason for deploying this site. Torcal.vercel.app. I really, we probably needed to just do like a simple URL than that, but go check out our community page. It has literally our schedule. We're about to do a call for ambassadors and a call for mentors as well. So if you are interested in being a mentor in our community, get some of that sweet swag I was talking about, go sign up on this page. It's gonna be a great one. And also too, final thing, If you want to be kept in the loop with when I go live, text live, text this number. I should probably edit this a little bit and say like text live. This is actually my number. I'm trying to use my texting community a little bit more than I have. So if you want to get caught up, I text every morning or every time I go live on like who the guest is. So text me if you want to be kept up to date. All right. So all that being said, we definitely got some people tuning in now this morning. So it's great. Okay, cool. We are moving to the Tor platform. There you go. Awesome. All right. So Nick, let's give a background about you real quick other than you like to read nerd books at the beach.

Yeah, yeah. So I've been in the tech industry for quite a while. I've been a dev professionally since 2002. Kind of worked all over the place. Had a lot of my early career in .NET and then eventually moved over to like kind of full stack Node.js, JavaScript, TypeScript kind of stuff. And It's kind of funny. Since 2020, I've been working professionally in open source. So literally getting paid to work in open source. So from Dev.to, Netlify, Open Sauced, and now Pomerium where I'm at. And it's kind of funny. People always thought I was a developer advocate, but I've always been full-time engineering. And this opportunity came up at Pomerium for a developer advocate role. Somebody in my network reached out. And I was like, you know what, people always think I am one, so like, hey, let's give this a go. Yeah, so, uh, yeah, it's been, it's been a wild ride in a good way, but, uh, super pumped to be over there.

I love that, I love that. All right, so let's get into meat and potatoes and why people are here. How to navigate big conferences. So I'm an introvert, I'm a social sprinter as I like to say. Um, you know, how many people are at KubeCon or are going to be there at least tentatively?

This is wild. It's apparently 6,000 to 10,000 people, uh, which is the biggest I've ever been to.

Dev World, then. Okay, like 7,500 is what they're touting.

Okay, yeah. So, and, and they have this twice a year. There's one in Europe always and then one in North America. Um, so it's, yeah, it's, it's the biggest one I will have ever been to. Before that it was Render, like we were saying. So, uh, Yeah, uh, yeah, I'm still thinking about how to navigate this because part of, part of what I'm going down there for, I'll be working at our booth, uh, for a bit.

Obviously it makes it a bit easier, I will say that.

Yeah, it's true, because you're obviously gonna talk to people. Yeah, but I'm kind of also, I'm new to this community and I'm not, I'm still pretty new to Kubernetes, so like I want to be able to try and catch some talks, but also like I really do want to meet people in that industry, in that community. So I'm just trying to figure out the best way to do that, really. Like, I am extroverted, so like, I have no— I— no problem just going up to a random person saying, hey, can I sit here and have lunch?

Crazy. That's what I— that's like my head of this— head of community, and I just can't. I'm terrible.

Well, it's funny that you say that, but like, until you said it literally, uh, publicly that you were not extroverted, I always assumed you were. So you like Yeah, you put a lot of work into it, but I know it's draining for you. It is.

So it is. And that's something like I'm trying to be mindful of. So like, um, so I'll, I'll kind of get nerdy for a quick second on kind of some things I'm thinking about. We can go back and forth. So like, yeah, yeah, for me, we don't have a booth. I'm going by myself. Um, I, I will have the video guys. We'll produce some pretty cool content I'm excited about. But, um, one of the things that I do really well on is podcasting and, and, and small intimate settings, right? So yeah, one of the things that I'm really excited about with DevWorld is they actually have a podcast booth setup.

Oh, that's sweet.

And it's fully equipped. And as far as I'm understanding, I'm gonna message Yos after this, who puts it together. He puts together JS World, by the way. Yos Gerard is the guy who puts it together. Um, they give you all the assets for free.

Okay, that's awesome.

So one thing I've thought about is like Why don't I just literally hole up all day and just interview people? Yeah, right. So if I'm doing 30-minute interviews now, that's a long time. I'm not saying I'm gonna do like 8 hours of interviews because I may shrivel up and die. But like, yeah, yeah. One thing I thought about is like, I may get a really heavy dosage. The content will be great, sure. But I think more, it's just more, I work better in those type of settings. So one thing I've been really laser focused on is the podcast booth. Getting people set up there. Another thing too is I'm throwing 2 dinners.

Okay.

So there is no speaker dinner for DevWorld.

Yeah.

So what I'm doing is I'm mainly outreaching to engineers and engineering leaders. So I mean, in full transparency, our ICP is engineering leaders, right? We want people to hire from Torque. So I wanna give a shout out to Hank Taylor, head of marketing at Laravel. He put out a podcast with he and Gonto recently. Check out, it's Dev Marketing, I think, is what it's called, or Dev Tooling or something like that, the podcast. Highly recommend it. But they talked about actually like how to throw dinners specifically. And so that's something.

Oh, nice.

So I'm trying to do an engineering leadership dinner and then I'm trying to do like a dev advocate dinner as well on 2 nights. So if you think about it, if I can get people on the podcast for an entire day and then I get 2 dinners going on, You know, I'm gonna meet at least 30 to 40 people. And you're probably, Taylor, you're probably going like, out of 7,500 people, that's not good math. But 30 or 40 intentional connections, I think it's pretty good at a conference. What are your thoughts?

Oh, for sure. Like, like, it's, it's like you could go spread fire and just like spend 1 minute like shaking somebody's hand or saying, hey, what's up, nice to meet you. But I don't know about you, but like, I'm generally pretty good with names, but I need to have at least a solid 2 to 5 minute conversation with somebody to lock that in so that I don't forget them. And it's definitely more important. And it's not exactly the same thing, but my old CEO, B Dougie, says you want to get your first 100 true fans in terms of a product.

Yeah.

Not exactly the same thing, but it really is true. I would rather have— every conference I've gone to so far, I met some great people at All Things Open. I mean, we hung out again. seen each other at other conferences.

Yeah.

But first time I met Jason, even though we chat all the time, Roxy, Richard, a bunch of people, and I had good connections. And it was us just going into a little nook and cranny. We went out for drinks after, we grabbed lunches together. And that's really where you make those more meaningful connections. And those will last longer than just going spread far, especially Your conference is like super huge, mine is super huge. It would— you would not be able to scale yourself to like if you were literally trying to hit everybody up there, you know what I mean?

So yeah. Yeah. And I think too, one of the things that I've, um, one of the things I've started to do early on is, and even with smaller conferences, is try to— so when I started my conference journey, I used to go, I want to know, I just, I want to meet one keynote speaker. So prime example, I'll never forget years ago, DevSpace in Chattanooga.

Yeah.

Reed Evans spoke and I was like, man, I've loved Reed Evans from afar. I love his stuff. I wanna meet Reed.

Yeah.

And like, that was my one goal. I went to a conference and now it was a smaller conference, like 200, 250 people. But like, I met Reed, I shook his hand after his keynote and literally like Reed, I mean, I would say we're professional besties at this point, right? Like he'll respond to my DMs. Yeah, for sure. He'll come on my pod. If I'm in Knoxville, we'll hang out. Right? Yeah. And, and, and that relationship stemmed out of like 10 years ago.

Yeah, totally.

And so I think a lot of people need to let themselves off the hook because I think they get anxiety.

Yeah. And you'd be surprised, like even if you're introverted or ambivert or extroverted, I would say in general, most people at a large conference like that will probably want to talk to somebody. Um, and like Obviously, like I said, I'm extroverted, so I have no problem just sitting at a table, but just saying, hey, how's it going? Or what's your name? I know it sounds silly to just—

Yeah.

But people will tend to open up and start chatting. And having these smaller groups also helps with that too, right?

Yeah.

If you're like 100 people at a table, it's even like if you go to dinner with friends, it happens to me when I've gone to a birthday dinner, The table's too big. Like, I didn't talk to 2/3 of the table because—

That's another issue that I have. I mean, my hot take is like dinner. Like, I have like 12 people confirmed for dinners right now.

Yeah.

I mean, I think if you get 10 people at a dinner, you're not talking to half of them. I really think like the perfect dinner is like 5 people.

Yeah. Or you could do something silly like say, hey, okay, we gotta, we gotta—

Everybody get up. Yeah. After that, everybody gets up and switches.

A waiter's worst nightmare, by the way.

Yeah, I know. Seriously. Oh, same. Yeah, I grew up doing that. Goddamn it. Yeah, I wanna give a shout to Code to Market. Highly recommend. I've sent that to my team a few times. I think Gonto and Hank Taylor give some really practical advice. The way they are thinking about dev marketing is exactly how I'm thinking about dev marketing from a Torque perspective. I highly recommend checking them out. Let me ask you this. How are you thinking about like, What's some conversations internally with, uh, uh, Pomerium? Uh, signups, are you gonna have a QR code on your phone? I know you have a booth, so it's a little easier to do signups there. What are some conversations internally of some goals that you're having for KubeCon?

Yeah, so I'll have to give some context to what the product is to just help, uh, shape it a little better. But so we're a security product. Uh, I'll give the technical what it is. It's, it's Zero trust security. And we're basically an identity-aware proxy platform that enables secure client connections to web apps and services without a VPN. And I'll explain what that means. I don't even know what that means. That sounds great. In a nutshell, this is not something you're gonna use on Vercel or Netlify. When I worked at Netlify, you just push your website up and it's there. Same thing with Vercel. This is more at the network level. So it's really like This is more for people that have internal apps that they want to secure. And so like part of, uh, my job and part of what we're trying to do at the booth is, you know, conveying that in a somewhat simple manner because like security is inherently complex. So being able to explain it in more simple terms or like being able to demo that in a, like, a reasonable amount of time at a booth. So, uh, we're definitely gonna have QR codes. We're We're basically gonna try and get them to sign up to Plumerium Zero, which is one of our offerings. You can sign up for free and stuff. And the idea is we want them to just go set up stuff on their computer. Like they don't have to do it immediately there. And part of the reason is we're thinking like, okay, maybe they could do this signup on our computer there, but then they're not really trying the product.

Correct, correct.

So that alone you might be like, okay, whatever, maybe if I have time I'll do that. But obviously we're going to have some swag, which I can't reveal what it is yet, but we'll have some. It's going to be decent swag that it's actually enticing to you. One, you have that first touchpoint where you speak to them. They hopefully go set it up. They come back for a second touchpoint where at a minimum, they're still going to get a decent thing of swag. But if they— we're still formulating how to do the nicer swag to give them based on— because we're not giving it out to everybody.

Sure.

But that's kind of the idea. And that's 2 touchpoints to talk with people. I think the other thing that's going to be interesting is because I'm new to that community, I'm still new to Kubernetes as well. I think I might potentially have an easier time talking to people.

Oh, you think so? That's kind of an interesting mindset.

Because I'm like, tell me about what you do with Kubernetes. I can be totally transparent. I'm super new. This is even my first conf here. Tell me about what you do with your you're with Kubernetes or whatever. I feel like that, you know, it could go either way, I guess. But I'm sure I'm thinking it might be to my advantage. We'll see. Yeah.

Do you have any, do you have any personal goals, right? Do you have any like, I really want to meet these people? Or I mean, like, like, have you kind of come up with kind of what your goal— because I think that's important, right? I don't want to gloss over the fact I think attending big conferences, you have to walk in with a goal because if you don't, You're literally going to feel like you didn't do anything.

Yeah, no, I definitely have a goal. Obviously, I have my work stuff I have to do, but there's definitely some people I want to meet, like Marino, who was on one of the Torque DevOps. I think that was yesterday. I don't know if Jason wants to—

Yeah, great panel. Shout out Jason. I mean, I didn't understand half the things that were said, but yeah.

Yeah, I met Marino briefly in Toronto at a conference, Refactor DX, in 2023, but didn't really talk too much. But he's in Canada too, and we've chatted a bit, but I'm looking forward to have a better conversation with him and just hanging. There's Justin Garrison, who's pretty well known in that community.

Yeah, he's pretty active on Bluesky, I think, if it's the same one.

Yeah. But speaking of dinners, when I went to All Things Open, somebody created an unofficial speakers dinner, which was a smaller dinner, and I got to speak to Justin and some other people in the space that I'd never met. So I'm hoping to go check out his booth, but also maybe hang with him a bit. And there's just some other people in that space that I still got to compile a bit of a list of people I want to hang with, but that's kind of my My personal goal is just like hang with maybe 4 or 6 people in that community and just kind of start learning a bit more about the community, but also those people, you know? So that's my main goal, personal one.

I love that. Is there any conversation you guys are having on a company level of just like, hey, we need to get this many signups or we need to get, like, is there any, I'm kind of curious. 'Cause again, we're having these, I mean, in full transparency, I'm trying to pick everybody's brain 'cause we're having these exact conversations at Torque. Like what does it look like with signups and is there a goal and all that stuff?

Yeah, I don't know our exact goals yet, but one thing I'll say is we're actually testing. I mean, we have goals. What I mean is like I don't have an exact number of signups I could give you. It's not because I'm not trying to say it, but one thing we're trying like for that whole swag flow I was telling you about, we're going to a smaller conference in Seattle a couple weeks before, so we're gonna test it out and see how that goes. And if If it goes well, great. If it doesn't go as well, we'll refine it. So kind of like a bit of a test bed, and it's less. It's a smaller comp, so less swag to give out to. So we're gonna do that just to see how things go. But but the main I'd say the main goal right now for this quarter is really making a creating awareness about the product. So so I've started doing some YouTube shorts. Like they they have a YouTube channel, but like a lot of companies. It's not necessarily a big following anywhere yet. It's usually—

yeah, we're building ours from the ground up right now.

Yeah, so I'm doing that and some shorts, uh, and I'll have some other content, but I'm also starting to do just informal live streams, more like bringing in community, and, you know, and I'll have guests on there like Becca, my good friend that we both know, Becca Harrowagle. She's coming on tomorrow. That'll be the first one. But yeah, it's really about awareness, so I think that's the main high-level goal right now.

100%. So kind of some underlying themes that I want to hit real fast in the last 10 minutes or so we got together. I've mentioned swag, you've mentioned swag. I've mentioned that swag's going to be good. You've hinted at you guys got some good swag coming out.

Yeah.

Just talk about your overall thoughts around it. I think most company swag sucks.

It does suck in general.

Are you guys having that? It sounds like you guys are having that conversation too right now.

Yeah. So I'll give you an example. Right now I'm wearing this shirt from Century. I got it off Syntax. And, you know, the design's kind of like here. It's like a bug slayer.

We're both wearing Syntax.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, regardless of what's on the shirt, what I would say is I love this shirt because it is a super comfortable t-shirt.

Same.

It's like stretchy and it's like Yeah, and I've definitely gotten t-shirts from other booths and they're literally scratchy and it's just not comfortable. And honestly, I think it's a waste of money.

100%.

If anything, spend a little more, or if you're going to give out swag that can't be a t-shirt, get a— I don't know, I know a lot of people like fidget spinners or something. Just get high quality. Don't break the bank, but if you're going to buy something, make sure it's Good. And yeah, I don't think this is a hot take, but I think we're kind of oversaturated with water bottles for swag.

Yeah, we're not doing no water bottles.

I, I'm giving away water bottles though.

I don't have it with me, but like a really nice one, like a really— like, uh, like I have one of those, the ones that, that's like a 40-ounce doesn't spill situation, uh, that's like $30 or $40 off Amazon. Like, like if you're gonna do it, like just go big if you're gonna do a water bottle.

Yeah. And I'll point out to a cool swag I got from— a couple that I got from All Things Open. So this here, it's just a USB cord, but I got it from Sourcegraph. It's really good quality and it's got multiple things and I use it all the time. Like, it's a useful thing. Not as useful, but I thought it was a cool swag is like from Red Hat, like the company. Like, they were giving out these fedoras and like, I don't wear it obviously, but like—

Sure.

My kids are like Carmen and San Diego, but it's a nice— it was just a cool piece of swag even though I don't really wear it. So I, yeah, you know, like I get it, it costs money, but I think if you— I'm generally a fan of if you're gonna buy something, buy it high quality, whatever it is, you know.

One thing we're doing is, and I follow a lot of fashion brands, we're gonna kind of modeled after a lot of the brands I follow. We are going to probably only have 1 or 2 public things that you can buy. Like, we will have a public interface or a public site, and it's only gonna be like 1 shirt. Now it's gonna be a good shirt, but it's only gonna be 1. The rest we're doing—

Yeah.

Is, so I did get the okay, which I'm really excited about. I'm gonna, you'll, the people who are here can hear it first. We are doing a limited run collab swag with All Things OpenAI.

Oh, nice. Yeah.

So I talked with Todd and they are allowing us to use some of their graphics.

Okay, cool.

So you can only get All Things Open AI swag, Torque, at All Things Open, right? So that's one thing we're doing. Another thing we're doing too is our ambassadors. Like, if you are a part of any internal programs, ambassador, mentor, mentee program, anything we roll out in the future, um, you will be gifted, uh, some very, very high caliber swag. Like right now, like Jason, um, is hosting a Denver meetup. Um, he's flying out there and we're doing an AI, uh, meetup. Um, uh, we will have Carhartt hoodies.

Nice.

So it's like, you know, for us, it's like, and we're gonna do limited drops and, and we're gonna keep things very tight. And we're also gonna have kind of like if you're, if you're an ambassador or part of our community and you're really vocal, we're gonna have— I kind of took it off a brand called Represent. Um, Represent is a London-based, uh, lifestyle and fitness brand. Um, and they have something where like all of their kind of like workout wear slash like if you're part of the club says 24/7 on it.

Okay.

Um, and so we're gonna have something like that where like if, if you're a part of the inner circle Like, you will have that. And so that's, again, like, I, I really think swag— like, I got really deep into, like, this, the, like, looking at fashion brands over, over Christmas.

Yeah.

And, like, if there's one thing that unites a community, it's actually merch or swag or whatever you want to call it, or apparel. Um, you know, it's, it's that public kind of nod, uh, that, okay, you're, you're a part of the club. And that's something that I really want to embody here at Torp.

Yeah, totally. And just getting back to high-quality swag, people are going to wear it. So if your name is on it, it's going to show up wherever they go. I still have this— shout out to Can't See Dots for Remix Conf. I have this Cotopaxi fanny pack and I use it all the time. And they had a really high-quality hoodie and I just like the look of it. And I wear that all the time too. So like, you know what I mean? It's not just like— it really isn't. I mean, obviously it's for the people that get the swag, but if it's good swag, you're, you're like getting free promotion all the time, you know?

Yeah. Well, so for some reason, I don't think LinkedIn is showing all the comments. Amanda Martin probably dropped in. I want to give a shout if it's the same Amanda I'm thinking of with Wix. Yeah, I still rock the Wix tote bag from Render 2 years ago or 3 years ago. Yeah. So I mean, it's a great tote bag and that's something we're doing too. We're gonna have a tote bag for Torque. And like, I take it whenever I go to the gym. If Jackie and I do like a quick kind of one-nighter overnighter type situation, like I use it. And I think, and again, like I truly think if you are in marketing, I know I saw some clips from, again, Hank Taylor from Laravel. Like they have some really, really good stuff coming in.

Yeah.

I truly think it can unite a community, in my opinion. I think it's incredibly underrated. And again, I want to wear Torque stuff 24/7, but I'm only going to wear 24/7 if it's comfortable and it looks good.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Another thing too, as we wrap up here, another underlying theme was, um, so we had swag. You said something else a few times, I'm drawing a blank. Um, but when it comes— so, so let's pivot for a second. Any— yeah, I'm trying to remember because there's another thing that you said a few times I want to bring back to it. But, um, any, any last piece of advice for people just even going to conferences in general? Like, like just anything that we haven't touched on?

Yeah, uh, I'll just reiterate, I understand people can be shy, but Just even if it's a big effort for you, just say hi to somebody. Like, and going to lunch is the easiest thing because it's like a table. It's like, oh, there's no— I don't know. I just— can I sit here? You know? And it's like, I know it can be difficult for people, but do that up. If you go catch a talk, you know, hopefully it's a good talk. You know, let the speaker know, you know, they'll really appreciate it. And it also gives you a touchpoint to go speak to the person if it's somebody you wanted to meet as well. Um, like, uh, like, I know, like, I've met Angie Jones a few times now, and like, I would consider her a professional friend, you know? Like, don't know her super, super well, but met her at React Miami and All Things Open, and I think somewhere else. But like, yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, aside from that, um, you know, there's a lot of talks going on. I, I, I'm laughing at Richard Choi— not at him, sorry— but like He was like, he's so dedicated to the people that he really wants to see talks for. And I remember at All Things Open, he's like, I really want to see your talk, Nick, but Danny's speaking. I'm like, don't sweat it, man. It's cool. Like, I appreciate the gesture, but like, don't, don't like go there for 10 minutes and then run over to mine or something. It's, it's like, I'm not taking offense at all. It's just, uh, you know, uh, but just kind of like figure out what talks you can go to. Hopefully they don't overlap with all the people you want to see. And this is more like depends on the conference, right? If there's one track, that's not an issue. But bigger conferences, it's probably an issue. You know, like it happened to me at Render. I caught Scott Tolinsky's talk on CSS, but there was another talk I couldn't catch. I think it was either Kelly Vaughn's or somebody else's. But it was just— just couldn't do both, right? So You know, but yeah, that's a great point I want to highlight.

Go to talks. I would thread and create content for the speaker.

Yeah.

I think that's the biggest hack in my perspective. If you come to any of my talks and you take pictures of me and you tweet thread something, I'm gonna repost it. Yeah. I'm probably gonna turn into content myself and give you credit. I'm gonna post the pictures.

Mm-hmm.

I think it's incredibly, incredibly important. So like, instead of just sitting in a meeting, instead of sitting in a conference session and watching it and not being active, take notes, tweet, live tweet, do something because the speaker is going to be so appreciative. No speaker is going to be upset that you did that. Like, no matter how big they are. Right. So like, again, I think creating content, and again, this is why I'm so passionate about content, is it's really the great unifier when it comes to networking. Yeah. So yeah, absolutely. I would create content for the speaker.

Yeah. And this just hits the thing. I know you talk about this all the time. I'm a big proponent of this too, but like, and it's not just because of this current job market, and I know the market's getting better, but like, I have only seen good things happen in my career since doing things in public. And doing things in public can mean many things. It doesn't mean you have to livestream. It could be you're just blogging or you're posting like you're saying, but do something to stand out right now.

Yeah.

Just do it. And it doesn't matter if you don't have a big following. It doesn't matter if somebody's written about something before, just do it. And you're just going to see, that's how I got contacted for my current role. They knew I post stuff all the time. They didn't read it all, but they're like, hey, you know, like, uh, just wondering if this might interest you, you know. And, uh, so yeah, just whatever you can do in public I think is just a net positive.

So 100%. 100%. All right, uh, wrap up. Last, uh, kind of rapid-fire questions. Um, again, thank you all for tuning in. Appreciate the comments, obviously were fantastic again this morning. Appreciate the Tor community for, for, for hopping in here this morning. Please go connect with Nick. He's a heck of a dude. So Nick, first question. Valentine's Day is here, is upon us. Hopefully you've made reservations or doing something, bought flowers or something. What's your favorite go-to candy during this Valentine's Day season? And don't say you like candy, just appease me and pick something.

Yeah, yeah. It's definitely not cinnamon hearts because those things are just like, I don't know, they're just too intense. And it also drank some Fireball whiskey in university.

Yeah, I've made some terrible decisions off Fireball.

Yeah, I've made some terrible decisions. But no, I think candy-wise, it is chocolate. I'll give a shout out to— it's just funny because my American coworker was in Canada recently. He bought Coffee Crisps. They're chocolate bars that are— I didn't realize they were only in Canada and they're really good. They've got a slight coffee taste to it, but chocolate. Or there's just like, there's like high quality chocolates you can get too. At least in Montreal, there's like, you can go to like kind of like almost like a chocolatier place and get some good chocolate. So that's probably what I'd go with.

Love that.

Jelly beans aren't bad either.

Gross. Next question. So if I told you that tomorrow morning you can't do anything in tech, But I pay you the same, if not more, AKA money's not the issue. What, what would you do? Like, like, basically what hobby would you pick up and make it your full-time job?

Yeah, I don't— maybe personal training. I like working out. Uh, I've been lifting since I was like 16.

And like, yeah, I saw a picture that you posted the other day.

That is a real picture.

Meathead.

I love it. Yeah, yeah. But I think, you know, and like whatever in that spectrum and just like helping in that industry, whether it's, uh, nutrition or training. But it's just like, I just like lifting heavy things. It just makes me feel better.

Same, same. Yeah, lifting heavy things and putting it back down. I love it. Um, next question I want to give, uh, I always—

I—

this is a new thing I've added— want to give shout out to people in the community. Who, who do you want to give a shout out to right now? Anybody in your community who, um, who's doing a good job.

Yeah, I'd say I gotta give a shout out to Roxy who's in the chat. Yeah, she's, she's putting herself out there all the time. Uh, you know, she's, she's breaking into tech and I just, I really enjoy that she posts all the time and she's very consistent.

Very consistent.

It also shows that she actually goes to the gym every day too. So, uh, so I just want to give a shout out to her.

Handstands for a living.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So handstands as a service. Um, yeah, no, I, I just think she's doing great, and I just— she's just good people. I got to meet her at All Things Open, so—

I love it. That's awesome. That's awesome. Shout out Roxy. Um, she's very, very vocal in our chat too, which I'm, I'm incredibly appreciative. Um, last question as we wrap up here, um, uh, because I, I forgot I had a meeting. Um, 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 them. Well, if you can go back in time and tell Nick Taylor, young Nick Taylor, anything about his career, what would it be?

I know, honestly, I wouldn't change anything. And it's not to sound cheesy or anything, but it's like, I wouldn't be where I am today because of the things I've done. Like, I could say stuff like sleep more, you know, shouldn't have, you know, stuff like that.

Fireball shots.

Yeah, exactly. You know, I mean, I would have said maybe, maybe don't Don't play with a broken ankle in a rugby game, maybe. I don't know, stuff like that. But no, in general, I, I went to university and I didn't apply myself as much in university. It was only after I focused honestly more on rugby. But, um, but I graduated. But I think I could have maybe applied myself more in university. But honestly, it didn't really change anything career-wise aside from some people. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I got asked for my first job if I had a degree. After that, it wasn't really brought up ever.

Yeah.

But yeah, so not too much, you know, kind of like Back to the Future stuff. Don't wanna change the future.

I love it. I love it. All right, awesome. Well, y'all, thank you again for tuning in this morning. We appreciate it. Go connect with Nick. Again, if you're going to conference, take some notes. I think this was a really applicable conversation for the conference season coming up. And last one of the week, last live of the week. So we'll see y'all next week. Nick, appreciate you. Um, Sam, thanks, man. How do you— backstage. But y'all have a great one, and we'll see y'all next week.

Later, everybody.