keynoting a 3k person conference | building the brand ep. 24

There was a miscommunication. Here's one, here's 2, there's 3.

We did it!

All the bags are in the back. We're heading to the convention center. I can't wait until we're rid of these 'Cause this is just too much. Too much. But, alright, so we got the Torque. So this is OG Torque shirt here. This is the shirt that we had for like this time last year, so I had to rep it. Again, really cool. You know, I talked about it in Dallas. You know, when we started the Torque team and the community team, really Commit Your Code and All Things Open were kind of our first conference. So again, it's really cool to like land here knowing everything we have planned this week. sold-out, at-capacity networking session tonight with CodeRabbit, Pomerium AI company. CodeRabbit's an AI company, and DigitalOcean. So that's packed out. Our invite-only Torque event on Tuesday's packed out now. So just to see where we've been over the last like year and how we've grown is just tremendous. So it's gonna be an exciting next 72 hours here in Raleigh.

Hey.

Hi.

Stoked to see you, baby.

Okay, but actually, yeah, going up.

What's going on? What's up, y'all?

I feel like I know you.

I mean, I mean, in real life.

Thank you for all your help. Thank you for all the help.

You know how many people I've met just through the guidance counselors? Yeah, like I could say at least 10 different people.

Really? 10 different people.

It's cool that like everybody's hanging out at our booth right now, like hanging out, socializing. Nobody's socializing at any other booth. That's because we're the vibes. The vibes are immaculate. The vibes are not immaculate. Oh my God, please do not flip. It's just rain.

Your AARP hasn't kicked in.

Oh my God.

We are off to Day Zero event networking. Shout out to Jason Torres for putting this together. It's a speed networking event. I'm not in charge of it. I don't know what's about to happen, but I heard it sounds pretty good. So we have about 45 people out there. It's gonna be great. And I should probably send them a message. But also we got the new Torque hoodies. Got the new Torque winter edition. For devs, by devs. Looking good. Look at that picture of us. Isn't that a good picture, Patrick?

We look good.

I know.

Anyways, it's gonna be a blast waiting on Brianna. It's gonna be a fun night. Let's have a good one. What up, buddy?

So, got cards. These are icebreakers. So everybody's gonna go around just like speed dating, and they're gonna talk about the topic here. So it's meant to just kind of ease into the conversation a little bit better. That's it.

It's great so far.

Energy's awesome. We're gonna kick off here shortly. It's great to see everybody. A lot of new friends. I know it's terrible. Do I have anything in my teeth?

So I'm Brianna, I work at Torque, and we're so excited that you're here. For those of you who don't know, Torque is a community-first jobs platform, and we are community-first. That's the most important part. Big thanks to Torque, Chromelium, CodeRabbit, and DigitalOcean for sponsoring this meetup, which is why I have to do the demo.

I hope you'll get the reason now.

Kamaran's an identity-aware proxy, and we're also an agentic gateway. So if you're trying to secure anything like MCP, Model Context Protocol, Come check us out.

All right, the turnout was awesome. Energy was great.

Thank you for everybody came out. It means a lot. I mean, listen, I say this time and time again. What we're doing is special. There's a lot of people in there like I mean some dudes was like I got a job out of this. So if that's really the case, like we do we. We did our job. So thank you everybody who showed up. That was great. And, uh, see y'all at the next event tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

Part 2. Day 1.

Peace.

Peace.

All right, so listen, stay at Marriott, you gotta go Starbucks. It is what it is. We gotta go to the conference center. It's right here. It's convenient.

I don't need anybody judging me.

We're doing a little banana cold foam this morning. It's delicious. Anyways, we're at Starbucks. I like to be basic.

Let's go get some—

let's go shake some hands and kiss some babies. Alright, so I'm really pumped about this, being able to sponsor the job board section. So one thing that All Things Open does I think is really cool is they have these whiteboards spread out around the campus, the convention center, where people, managers can come write like who they're hiring, what they're hiring for, whatnot. And Todd, who runs this that graciously said, hey, if you guys want this option, we'd love to give it to you. So the job boards are made possible by Ronstadt's work. So really cool opportunity. Again, kind of goes with our mission to help connect people and be community first and connect people throughout their job search.

Good to see you.

Good to see you.

Good to see you.

Yeah, I'll be at your talk tomorrow.

Good.

I'll heckle or come discuss.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, please.

We got about 2 hours until resume reviews. Me and Jason are gonna do that. Really excited about that.

Should be big.

Everybody we've talked to, people are pretty I'm pretty pumped about it, so I think it's gonna be a blast. It's definitely gonna be like a game show slash stand-up comedy type of vibe, so I'm pumped about that. There he is, there he is. Get a little, little simple carbs— complex carbs, simple carbs— before our talk. That sounds great. Jason, are you excited?

I am excited. It's gonna be good. I'm not excited for the lights being so low, though.

Uh, we can turn them up.

Okay, so I guess we're starting. Yeah, but people are still filling in.

Well, they can hear and talk at the same time.

Yeah, go ahead. Hear and talk?

Yeah.

All right, well, hey, yes, we designed this.

No, you designed it.

Yeah, that's true. I say we all the time, but it was clearly me. Yeah, I designed this to be interactive because I want this to be a learning experience for not only the person whose name is on that resume, but for everybody that's watching it.

Immediately, my eyeballs don't know where to look. Now, whether you like it or not, recruiters and hiring managers look at your profile for like like 7 seconds. They create narratives based on media. So right here, I'm looking at contact, I'm looking at summary, I don't know where to look, right? So we need that all in line. Here's the deal, the summary portion of your resume is the single most important part. If you do not catch the attention of people's eyeballs in the summary section, people will move on. I'm all fired up right now, man. Yeah, yeah. So Matt, I'd probably like, this kind of like falls off a little bit here. Like, what is meaningful user experiences, right? Like, your meaningful user experience could be different from somebody else. That's what I would be careful about. When you start using those words, what— oh, there you are. What's up, dude? There you are. What I would do, 'cause then it's like, then you could get challenged on that, right? Be very to the point and bring out specific. But for me, for me, what I would do here, if I got called for a senior mobile engineer slash manager role and I came across Matt's resume, I would call him immediately. because of his summary portion. For those of you who haven't worked with recruiters yet, all recruiters do is they take the job description, they call the hiring manager, they ask how many years of experience does a person need with these skills, and then they go start recruiting. So if you literally have that at the top of your profile, it helps us recruiters scan it faster and call you faster. Sweet. We will stay after to answer some questions. Again, thank y'all. Come by the booth, grab some swag. I have 1,500 tote bags I have to give away. Please come get them. We love y'all so much.

Thank you so much.

I'm keynoting tomorrow morning, and then my Exposing the Interview talk is tomorrow afternoon. Hope to see you there.

Thanks, everybody. How's it going, Tom?

Oh, great.

How are you?

Doing good.

I think so far so good.

You know, a few bumps in the road, but you always have that. But overall, it's great. Dude, that was, that was, that was insane. That was standing room only again. Super grateful. That was awesome. Jason crushed it. We killed it. Just beyond grateful. So cool.

Hey, I set up a booking thing on the app, and it's like Completely full, so we have like 22. There were 22 slots and they're all gone already. So I guess that's good.

So we are hanging out with Whiskey Web and whatnot. We're gonna hang out, talk a little torque. Torque boy.

One two count of ten. It's that time again. Get out your head. Get back in again. Bang bang hit the wall. Mr. Know it all. Shipped up fell down. Oh so criminal.

Hanging with Robbie and the Whiskey Web and Whatnot crew was awesome. Great interview with Jason just on community and the future of what we're building at Torque and just how authenticity wins the day. But I'll tell you this, I am so tired. I think I gotta go lay back down and I gotta practice my talks for tomorrow. So your boy may pack it up early tonight and rest up because I need a nap. All right, so it's 5 It's 5:52 in the evening and I'm working on my keynote tomorrow. So I haven't touched this keynote since I spoke, what, a month or 2 ago here in Raleigh. So we're gonna run over it. I have 12 minutes. I think it's really difficult. It's very difficult, very challenging to give a very specific keynote talk in 12 to 15 minutes. And so I'm gonna run over it now. Just kind of talk to myself. Patrick, if you want to You obviously listen to me ramble in the back. I'm fine with that. So we're gonna, we're gonna go over the future of AI in your career. So we're gonna go ahead and work on that now. Walking to dinner. Rested, recharged, went over my talk. Got 10 minutes done, like 10 minutes into it, or I did it for 10 minutes and I just read the slides. So that's good to know. 12 minutes is gonna be extremely difficult tomorrow. So anyways, recharged, Feeling good. Gonna go have dinner with the team and then, uh, yeah, go right here and then, uh, watch a little football, go back, probably hit my keynote one more time. And we got Dads in Tech tomorrow morning. I don't want it.

Today's booth was so exciting because so many people were just excited to be able to go somewhere and find remote work.

Find what?

Remote work, but also find a community of people who are going to support them. People are telling me that they're not getting the community that they want and they don't know how to find it. So that's what we're here for. That's what we're starting. That's what we're doing. And they're like, how many events do you do? Like once a month? No, maybe we do like 4 or 5 events a week.

Yeah, I actually shared it too.

I was like, we average like 4 to 7 virtual events a week. And everyone was like, what?

Exactly. Because that's what people are wanting right now. You're meeting them where they are. Simple as that. And yeah, so today's booth was really good. People were very happy. They were very excited.

Today was awesome. Good energy.

We have 3 hours of resumes.

Yeah, tomorrow's gonna be interesting. Stay tuned. Stay tuned. You're gonna see him at the booth for 3 hours straight. We'll see how that goes.

And keynoting and my talk at 11:30.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Get them bagels.

Day two of all things open. Great day. We're tired. We need to get some sleep. But tomorrow's nuts. Tomorrow's absolutely insane. We'll do an intro tomorrow. But again, thank you to everybody came out to our talk today. It was incredible. The DMs we've received is amazing. And yeah, can't wait for the booth was great. Everybody was great.

All the volunteers were super helpful. Yeah.

Day three tomorrow.

Pumped. Woo! Woo! Woo!

It's been like this all morning.

It's a good morning to have a good morning. Let's go make it a good keynote. So real quick, Jeff, for the camera, Jeff and I used to work out in Raleigh 2013 CrossFit, and then, you know, we ran into— life's good. All right, trying not to be nervous. It's a big day. It's a big day.

I feel good.

I feel good. I'm feeling a little nervous. Gotta finish up my PowerPoint slides. I'm just excited to bring the noise this morning, man. Get people pumped up. I don't read. I'm not great with details. And I read last night at 10:15 at night that our slides need to be on Google Slides and not Keynote. So your boy spent the last hour transferring these over.

So let's do it.

Listen, I am pumped to be here. This is this is a pinch me moment for me. Shout out to my wife Jackie for allowing me to be here supporting me and the kids.

Yeah, give it up.

We like to put blame on things, and at the end of the day, the blame should be the overhire that happened in 2022. It's not AI. Guys, use X. For the love of the Lord, get on X.

Taylor, it's stupid. There's politics on it. People are dumb.

Yeah, it's social media, man. You see Facebook lately? This does not happen normally. You understand that, right? So if you see Todd, you see Danny, you see the team today, tell You finished your keynote?

Yeah, dude.

Keynote well?

Let's go over here. Keynote was just unbelievable. Just a blessing. The response was tremendous. Still, my head's buzzing, mind's racing. We got to go in and give another one in 5 minutes, so let's go. What's up, y'all? Good morning.

Yeah!

For those of you walking in, we have a ton of room up here. When I say ton, that's highly subjective. But we have room up here at the front. I'm gonna text Todd actually right now. Y'all smile, everybody smile and raise their hands and look fun. And there you go. I'm actually gonna text Todd right now and be like, I need a bigger room next year. Is there really people out there? That's crazy.

All right.

Oh man, I'm stuck. This is— I knew this was not gonna go well. How do you lead in with that conversation where it's like, oh, I have this experience, right? You're not just sending them like a paragraph Because like you said, it's like 15 seconds and you're like, oh God, I don't want to read this. Yeah, I got 3. Also, don't do what I did with my wife on Tinder and do hey. Don't do that. It worked, but— Sounds like it should be. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right? Hey, smiley face, but don't do that professionally. So basically, so here's the deal. So what I would do is I'd be very specific and to the point, right? So, and what was your name, ma'am? Oh no, no.

Ali.

Ali.

I would go Ali, right? Ali. If I were you, I'd message somebody in the industry you want to be like, hey, I've always wanted to get into tech sales. I have a PhD in this industry. I feel like I can provide XYZ to your organization. Would you like to talk? Would love for chat with you for 15 minutes. I said that like 30 times.

Huh?

30 different people.

30 different people.

All right, dude, that was— come on, man. I, I will say this, I'm sad it's already over. Like, it, it just flies by. Um, but man, just again, Todd, thank you for having me. That talk was just— I mean, the breakout— the banana— not the breakout, just like the talk we just had, incredible. We went over— you got footage of it. I mean, people are just so hungry for like good job search content because there's so much bad content out there. So again, Todd, thank you for having me. Danny and the All Things Open team, thank you. I am— I don't know where I'm at right now. My head's buzzing so much, but I haven't eaten. Time to review some resumes. We're going to review some resumes now. We need to go help Jason.

I'm sure he's mad at me. All right, last event of the day.

Let's do this, my guy.

Great day.

I am pumped for this. It's really cool. Like, um, one of the first places— I'm not kidding you— one of the first places I had lunch. So I interviewed when— back in the day when I was at Bayco, I interviewed for our Charlotte and Raleigh office, and I came here For lunch during my interview in Raleigh. And it's cool now to be throwing an event of like 45 people at an event here, like what, 15 years later? Or not 15, like 10 years later. It's, it's cool. So I'm really excited. Great to see some friends. Had some people at Vayco hit me up, wanted to come by from the Raleigh office. We got some people from Ronstadt, and then we of course have our community coming. So it's going to be, uh, it's going to be just a great time.

Great.

A lot of people. A lot of people.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, like today was like the busiest day and it just was like, yeah, very— So how was the conference overall? I mean, Todd puts on a heck of a conference. I mean, I think— I thought the people were great, super engaged. I mean, I sound like a broken record, but people just love what we're doing. I mean, so many people were like, no one's doing what y'all are doing, no one's doing what y'all are doing, I love what you're doing, I want to be a part. Like, we have— I have so many emails in my inbox right now I can't even count how many times people asked him how he could get involved. They can get involved. I know, I know, I know. So many. So no, we're super grateful, and we're grateful for Lucas. We're grateful for Pat, all of our helpers, and Brianna, our community worker. She's not a helper, but we're still thankful. Yeah, we're still thankful for her.

Yes.

Yeah, team mom, team mom, team mom.

Yeah, good times.

I'm so—

I feel good.

Good.

I feel great.

Good.

Surprised. Happy for you.

I know, me too. Community is back. And so the— in the data space, the dev space, tech space, knowing that things are shifting and changing, it's just so exciting to see, see the enthusiasm and passion around community.

In our hometown, we've always been a part of some type of community, whether it be PTA or like after-school programs. So we're used to being involved in community.

So being with Torc felt right So the resume review was super cool.

This room was packed out, people asking questions, getting their resume feedback. It was one of the most engaging sessions I think I've seen at a conference, but even more valuable was how after the talks, in between talks, at the table at the booth, Jason and Taylor were doing live resume reviews as people came by. Every time I stopped by the booth, constantly all day, people there getting this super tremendous value from them. One of the most unique things I've ever seen at a conference booth like this. I hope to see more of that in like future events too.

I've been with Torque since 2021, and it's really cool to be here at All Things Open in 2025 with the community. I just want to say like the folks in here are taking a chance on us early on, right? And like we, we do not take it for granted. If we want to be community first, we need people behind us, who are championing us throughout basically everything we do. And the people in this room are the ones doing that. So again, thank you so much. It means the world to us. Again, just thank you. Like, I am humbled that you guys love what we're doing. The response over the last 48 hours has been just tremendous.

Really too late to call, so we wait for morning to wake you. How'd it go, guys?

I think it was great. I mean, I feel like I repeat someone else's talk. I feel like I repeat myself. Everything's great. We went 2 for 2.

He doesn't want to get takeovers. Happy hour was awesome.

Our happy hour was—

Brianna, yeah, team crushed it. Brianna crushed it. Shout out to Bri. Shout out to the team. We're building something special.

We are.

I mean, people— I mean, David Hale came up to me. Shout out David. He's in Nashville. He came up to me. He's like, I wish I had this. I had so many people go, I wish I had this. So, um, Again, thank you to everybody who showed up. Oh my God, there's traffic. What is this freak doing? Todd Lewis was like, "You need to come to our events next year, please." Thank y'all so much. Thank you, Raleigh. Thanks for the editing work.

Thanks, Raleigh.

Yeah, appreciate y'all.

Just keep on driving till you make it to my place. You're crying in the shower, wiping makeup off.