pretending to have the job before you get it w/ josh cirre, devrel @ laravel

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Okay. That was weird. Were you live? It just said I was having problems connecting to the internet. I was like, I've been on the internet all morning. The internet is fine. My modem is literally right here. Just straight brain cancer every day. All right. Hold on. I got to send out the alerts. Alert the troops. Hold on. Drop the Torque Discord. Here we go. All right. Cool. All right. Good morning, everybody. Happy hump day. It's October first. I don't know where this year went. Do not know, Josh, where'd this year go? That's a great question. Like all of a sudden I looked up and it's October.

That's basically how it happened. I feel like corporate, what's not talked about enough is I feel like corporate America makes time liquid or elusive or like it doesn't make sense. Yeah. like i'm sure i don't know i'm sure you've maybe had this like my wife's like you know i'm like hey like you know you told me this yesterday she goes that was two weeks ago and i was like what yeah it's crazy it's even crazier that like um today marks the so i might i might job and live i don't know what get to say but the reason why time has seemed to fly for me is we have launched three products in this year you guys ship i'm not a developer but i feel like you guys you guys are like moving It is at a speed.

It's nice to be able to like, oh, this is like a third launch. We got this. And then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, we have all of October and November. What are we going to do? What are we going to do with our life? We'll come up with more stuff. We'll come up with more stuff. I love it. Good morning, y'all. Welcome. It's good to see y'all. Please say hey. We'd love to hear from you. Again, like I tell people, I've done this show now for five years. It's crazy. Congrats. Yeah. Thank you. Which is nuts. It was five years in March. So we're coming up on six years.

And yeah, For me, you know, my original thesis to start this was just to help people. I think now what it's really turned into is it's turned into, in my perspective, a mini conference or a mini meetup. Right. So like yesterday, for example, we had two hundred fifty comments on Mark Thompson's live yesterday. Two hundred fifty. So that's crazy. Maybe maybe we'll be it today. We'll see. Y'all keep comment and say, hey, and that for the record, that's two hundred fifty just on my LinkedIn. Yeah. Right. So like and also I'm super grateful, super blessed. Like we've moved this into an hour and there's been no fall off.

That's nuts. And so what I tell people is this is this is a networking event. This is a mini conference. This is a mini meetup. Actually, it's a big meetup, I would say virtually. So, whoa, here we go. Look at that. That was awesome. how many cameras do you have going that was wild you freaked me out just then uh someone in the chat said talk started talking about the the wink everything but yeah i got i got this main camera we got a little little zoom in action we've got the side camera on a slider so what's up everyone over there it's it's a it's a little moving camera shot makes a little bit more cinematic and then we got one more right here you have four cameras going on but technically three in this setup and then one more at my editing desk.

Unbelievable. You're a monster. I love that. Yeah, I mean that in the best way possible. So say, hey, we'd love to hear from you. Connect with everybody in the chat. There's a lot of people in the chat already. And, you know, again, you know, and we'll probably talk about today, the power of networking, just saying hey to somebody, cultivating that relationship over LinkedIn, over X. I mean, it works, right? Or you can just run into each other at a church conference like Josh did. And also connect with Josh, right? It's like I tell people, like, I've been noticing for five years, if you connect with every single guest that I've had over five years, your network would be, I would put my network up against anybody's.

I would say, I would say Gabe Greenberg, maybe have a better network than me at GTI, but I would put my network up against anybody. So please connect with everybody. Also kind of few housekeeping things as always. First off, I am an app right here. as well as my guy jason torres um probably the only non-technical non-developer on a heroes program um i don't i've never used their product but i like the people so i'm gonna rep it um so y'all check them out app right uh love the crew over there also listen we got a brand new re refresh situation going on the torque.community site it looks great we have like we're We have like references, not references, but like testimonials.

We got like a place to sign up for our ambassador. By the way, we're opening up our ambassador program. Jason, you're in a chat. We need to make an announcement. We're officially opening up our ambassador program signups for next year. And we're going to be very, very intentional with that this year. So go to Torque.community. We're also going to relaunch our second cohort of our mentor mentee program. So check that out. That's on our Torque.community site. So check all that stuff out. We'd love to have you. Also, listen, if you want to be notified when i go live with guests like josh twice a week text live this is my number this is actually my number um it's not some ai thing i'm a jigger um so text live to six one five two three five five six five zero um would love to have you um a part of that and i just shoot out one text just let you know when i'm going live i won't spam you i promise all right we got a lot of people in chat this morning so again please say hey Um, we'd love to hear from you.

So Josh, let's get the people what they want, what they want. For those of you, for those of the people who don't know you, which to be honest with you, a lot of people do, who are you, what do you do? And we'll go from there.

yeah well first off sounds like you have like nothing going on so you maybe should get on that and just start i have a little bit more going on yeah nothing yes super excited to be here uh i've i i feel like i've observed you doing this like for the past like maybe two years now i think way before i was at laravel but yeah um i am developer relations at laravel that's kind of like developer relations engineer at laravel that's kind of my full title i don't want it to fit fully on the little thing down here but uh basically in a nutshell i

uh i like doing so many things that i eventually got hired by laravel the open source company for a php framework but that also has a couple different paid products as well and then i just make content as well as kind of like help with um kind of engineering for marketing sites stuff like that as well as just being able to communicate with community as well so i'm like one eighth of what you all get to do yeah yeah yeah i love it i love it um also dad father too and then they're on the way we're gonna be we're gonna be buddies i don't

we're gonna be like in a an elite club together we're catching up with aaron francis Yeah, we'll make we'll make the like the three fourths Aaron Francis Club kind of thing where it's like, hey, we're we're on the way.

But we're probably not going to get there because we're probably going to happen out. You know, I mean, I thought we were done. So there you go. There you go. But yeah, I have I live in the great state of Arizona where it's starting to get nice and cool. It's so brown. It's so brown. it's so brown but my wife and i went to arizona like two years ago or something like that for like a like a wedding anniversary trip to a spa place everything was brown the dirt was brown the houses were brown the sky was kind of brown everything was brown okay but when the when the sun sets the sky the sun reflects off those mountains which was crazy there you go see we it's always funny the one thing that everyone freaks out about arizona because i've lived here pretty much my whole life i went to school in chicago did a little bit of stuff in like virginia north carolina atlanta and then i went back to colorado then i'm back to arizona full full swing of things but one of the things that uh everyone kind of freaks out about is like we don't have yards in arizona don't have yards you have patches of dirt it's the craziest thing ever we we when you like buy a house or like when you're landscaping you're like hey we should update our yard it's hey which gravel should we put in our front yard so i'm full serious Which cactus should we use?

Like, which of these three plants that live in the desert? Cactus and dirt. We should get the red dirt. That sounds great. Also, too, hi from Mozambique. Okay. You're just showing off. That's crazy. Mauro, thank you for tuning in. Mozambique this morning. We are international. That's crazy. International. That's crazy. All right. So... I always ask guests to kind of fill out some topics they want to talk about. I don't have preset questions. I like to just go with the flow. But I do want to bring up kind of some three things that Josh, I can tell Josh is really organized. Most people don't do this.

There's three things that Josh wanted to talk about today. Pretending to have the job you want. I'm really big on that right now. The balance of when to go above and beyond and why. Fantastic. And finding where your future employers hang out. all, all three are incredible. All three could probably be an hour, but I'm like listening back to those. I was like, wow, those are like really good topics. I love it. All right. So I'm really big right now. I'm pretending that pretending to have the job you want, fake it till you make it do the job before you get the job. Is that kind of in the same vein as what you meant here?

Oh yeah, definitely. A hundred percent. Talk about it. It's, It's something that I, so for example, we'll take it all the way back to when I first started out. I want to plug you and Will's stuff. You want to plug you and Will's show? Because I love you boys to death. That's awesome. You guys, yeah, I do. So apart from just having, and it looks like a couple of people are on my YouTube stream right now. So thank you so much for watching. But I do content on my YouTube channel. And then me and Will King, who some of you might know, some of you might not know.

He was on the show a few weeks ago. okay oh there you go i forgot yeah uh we do a live show on friday at uh two thirty p.m eastern or eleven thirty a.m uh pacific time and it's just a fun show for us to just talk about like all things tech we call it riff and refine so basically we're just chatting about anything that the design is great love it Yeah, that's all Will. I just come with the vibes and a little bit of this. This is all I come with. This is what I come with. Yeah, but it's great, and we'd love to have you there.

It's a live show, so it's all streamed live, and so you, the community, it's fun to have people chatting. That's what we like. Yes, absolutely. All right, so doing the job before you get the job. Talk about that. Talk about some initial thoughts, and then we'll riff and refine on that. There you go. I love it. Taking it back. Yeah, I've always been under the kind of guidance of, hey, I don't want to just do what I'm currently doing. This kind of flows into like that second category that I kind of like pushing. But I... before i started in tech i knew that i wanted to get into dev rel because i came from like the performance side of the world um in the sense that i thought i was going to be on snl i trained for about four years to try to be honest yep Uh, Chicago, I trained in second city and I was like, Hey, I'm going to play this politics game of just knowing who I know and going to auditions and the waiting and being in musicals and then figuring out, okay.

I eventually learned like, hey, if I'm ever going to start a family, I can't do this right now. So I eventually went to tech. And there was a lot of people at the time, specifically Cassie Codes, Jason Langsdorf, who were starting this new role of DevRel, developer advocates. And most of them had similar backgrounds to me. They were in TV, film, stage, theater. And I was like, this would be so cool. Because it blends the two things I really love, technology and learning new things, and then also being able to teach, be on camera, podcasts, videos, whatever that might be, and be able to share it.

Yeah. And so every single job that I had, which was mostly customer support jobs, I eventually got into sales engineering, which is basically DevRel for enterprise. That's what I like to call it. I like that. And then there's a couple, that's pretty much it. Like support engineering jobs, customer support jobs. Most of all the tech jobs that I had leading up until this point were not DevRel jobs, but I made it DevRel. So I... basically took time outside of my own stuff that i was supposed to do yeah and i was like hey i'm going to oh if if ten customers ask me this question i'm gonna make this video and then when they send that again now all of my customer support team can be like hey josh just made this video about how you can and this isn't super technical stuff this is like how you can uh for example if we had like form building software it was like yeah how you can customize your forms.

And so it was just like a how to type video. But I eventually learned how to get better at making videos quickly. And then I learned how to get better at like actually providing the information most people want to have in those types of videos. And so every single job I had, I basically just pretended, I was like, Hey, this company doesn't have dev rel, but if they did, what would that look like? And I just, I just started doing it. And so when I got, uh, when I got let go.

um in uh september of twenty twenty uh four twenty twenty twenty three sorry september of twenty twenty three i just had my second kid um and the company i was working at fired me nice great timing perfect perfect time perfect time i was on paternity leave yeah i got called in you know they're like hey you're you're fired and uh i was like okay i don't want to do sales engineering again i want to try devrel but you know i knew so many people in dev rel at the time who were looking for jobs who were like years of experience in my opinion who are

much better than i was and so i was kind of faced with like this confrontation of okay i have been doing this for four five six years just under a different name and probably under different pretenses but i just pretended like i've i've been in devrel for that long because i've been making videos about specific talk topics talking about technical things discussing it to non-technical people yep and that's what i eventually landed at laravel how did how did uh how did you find laravel how did laravel find you i'm curious of that story yeah it's a wild story um so little bit a little bit

of backstory i most of the technical support jobs that i was working and the sales engineering jobs a lot of that was kind of all in the javascript world so that even though it wasn't super technical roles it was mostly me helping out customers with small javascript stuff of like hey you're non-technical person but if you put in this javascript script it was like in sales it was a salesforce app and so if you put in this javascript snippet All of a sudden, your form can do a whole bunch of cool things.

Or I worked at a company called Help Scout, which is customer support ticketing software. And a lot of the enterprise customers were like, hey, we need to do X, Y, and Z. I was like, okay, well, you can throw up this JavaScript script and it can go to a web hook and you can do all these things. So I learned all pretty technical stuff. And on my side time, I would just start learning how to build apps because I was like, oh, if I made a SaaS, that'd be awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could make some money. I could learn how to build things. And so I knew enough JavaScript to basically every single night I would try to learn a new framework or a new language, a new package.

And I would be like, hey, how would I use this if I was building my own thing in a job? And so... i i basically i would because i consider myself like an intermediate developer at javascript and i knew firebase i knew super base i knew all of those kind of back end-esque kind of things and so i eventually was like i just want to have a better stack yeah in order to build things faster yeah because there was so much stuff that i was building and it just took forever to build the things i wanted to build yeah and i felt like one i was a terrible developer and two i felt like i just didn't have what it takes if i was going to ever be in devro sure or working for an actual technical company like i was doing interviews and there this was like um and everyone was like oh you know you don't have the experience that that we need that kind of thing yeah and i eventually started building Every night I would build out my demo application of choice.

It's kind of like a to-do list, but there's a little bit more intricacies with it where I call it this bookmarklet kind of thing. I have a name for the demo app that I build with different products. But it's called bookmarklet. And so basically it's like you have your own, you log in, And you can keep bookmarks of like a URL. But those bookmarks are only saved to your specific account. And then you can add notes or a description to them. So that way, when you're searching for them later, you can find whatever page that you saved as a bookmark. You can be like, okay, why did I save this?

And then you can find it. The reason why I had that application was it reaches every single aspect that you might want in a developer tool. Sure. Okay. Authorization, authentication. You learn about keeping things scoped to a specific user. You learn about validation rules, all this kind of stuff. And so every night I would try to... Until the wee hours of the morning, I would try to build that app in like ten different tools. A new tool every night. So I tried it in Rails. I tried it in C Sharp's Blazor. I tried it in Elixir with Phoenix. I tried it with all the JavaScript stacks.

So SvelteKit, SolidJS. I tried it with Vue.js, Nux. I tried it with Next. Next was probably the one I was more familiar with. And then I eventually tried Laravel. And I kind of timed myself. How long does it take me to build this app in all these things? This is, of course, learning the tool and learning the language, which I never worked with PHP before. And it took me like less than an hour to build the app in Laravel and I never touched it. And every other app was like close to like five hours of me like... digging through things and learning how mostly because the authentication piece i had like thirty percent of it done yeah within like ten minutes yeah um and yeah so i eventually said okay any new project any new side thing that i'm gonna do i'm just gonna build in laravel And so over the years, like as I was still working at all these other companies, I was like, Hey, you know, if a new customer came up, I was like, okay, what would I, how would I solve this problem in a Laravel back in it?

So I would eventually like any new SAS idea I had, I would just kind of like build it out. And all of my SAS ideas were trash. Eventually one kind of took off and that was more or less the reason I got fired. And I kind of like use that as a, as a way to make a little bit of money while I was fired. Um, Um, but I eventually just became, I don't know. I became known even though I was barely talking about it. Um, up until I got fired, I became kind of known as like this person who was like, Oh, I started building in JavaScript and all of a sudden, usually people go from PHP to JavaScript.

Sure. And I went from JavaScript to PHP. Yeah. Catholic to Baptist. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. You're just going backwards at that point. Um, and so I, I, um, I kind of leaned into that a little bit. And when I got fired, I was like, I'm going to do something crazy. I don't have a YouTube channel, but I'm going to just make a YouTube video. And so I made first YouTube video of most people on Twitter. And I probably had, I don't know, six hundred followers at the time. Most people on Twitter, which is a lot, but it was just over time of me talking about Laravel and maybe JavaScript stuff and stuff like that.

And at the time, I made this video because most people ask me, okay, why are you choosing Laravel? Like, why do you do that? And so I just made a video and I was like, hey, this is why I choose Laravel. um and the first week i made that video and kind of posted on twitter it kind of went around i think it had like a thousand views and i was like that is awesome that's crazy i think i got i think i got uh like uh i had like three subscribers at the time i think it was my brother my mom and like my an ex-girlfriend or something like that.

Yeah. From like way, way back. I haven't really posted any videos. And eventually I like had like a hundred subscribers. And then by the time I put out my next video, there was like, there was like two hundred subscribers. And then all of a sudden that video just like took off or like more and more people were like, hey, one, this is really good quality. And then two people were like, I agree with all these things. Like maybe I should try it. And all of a sudden I was, I was thinking, one uh i was kind of nervous to start putting out content about laravel one because i was so new to it i started losing using it like in that last year yeah and two there are so many amazing educators in the laravel space sure people like jeffrey way who have been teaching it since like the net tuts day um who has lara casts and he kind of that's that's his whole that's his whole job teaching laravel yeah and so i had this like fear of i'm not going to be good enough so i'm just going to make it my own i'm the guy who is learning laravel and so i learned it from this javascript perspective um and it's crazy how that first video is still i think it's one of my top three or top five viewed videos on my whole channel like it's it's close to like fifty thousand views i think right now that's crazy so I know people get tired of me saying this.

Yeah. Put shit out. Like I don't, is it, is it that simple? Like I just, I mean, even Barrett Blake on here, who's in the chat right now, I just great interview. Uh, I would check it out. We talked more about Azure and.net with him, but like he got his job because he just kind of like was putting stuff out and got to network with people and found a job. I mean, is it, is it that simple? that's the crazy part is it's definitely that simple and i like like i feel like i you know i had some success mostly because then i got hired by the laravel company who who eventually took on funding and they're like hey we don't have any we have we have one video guy his name is christoph he's making amazing videos for the laravel channel um and i eventually applied to laravel in a support role and i was like if i just get to work with laravel okay all right talk about that real quick why Like, cause I feel like everybody, I feel, listen, I don't mean to be mean here, but some of y'all are so daggum hardheaded.

There's my first job has got to be a developer. I'm like, there are so many other, I'm keynoting an engineering conference as essentially a recruiter. You don't need to always get that first job as a developer. And I feel like you went that path or tried to go that path. Oh yeah, there was, so don't get me wrong. Most of the jobs, especially in this time of, I was unemployed. I was. My wife gratefully allowed me to like make video. Cause I told her, I was like, Hey, One, I wish I started earlier. I wish I started while I had a job. Same. I'm mentoring two freshmen from South Carolina right now.

Oh, yeah? And one of the girls is like, what would you have done? Just because I don't have enough on my plate as it is. And she goes, what would you have done? I said, I would have started to create LinkedIn content as a freshman in college. Oh, yeah. Easily. Can you imagine now? I it's funny because I, I've been making videos for my, the jobs I've had for probably like eight years now, just a little innate. They all sucked. But like, I was imagining, like, imagine if I was actually documenting the things I was learning way before Laravel. I can't, I can't imagine. Like, I'm glad I started when I did, but I wish I had started way earlier.

yeah and maybe like when i started when i did like it was like oh this guy looks like he's a professional video person because i had been doing it so it's like that overnight success feeling or whatever but i don't know i still wish i started earlier yeah and even leah friend fellow fellow laravel um or even as a even as a web developer my first role in tech was an email developer yeah oh yeah i used to hire email developers back in the day yeah so like i i uh i i Of course, had worked in customer support. I had worked in support engineering.

I had worked in sales engineering. And I remember putting out a video on Twitter. It was right when Jason Langsdorf and a bunch of other like people were kind of like putting more honest content about like, hey, here's what's going on my head, why I feel like I have imposter syndrome. What's up with life? And I put out this video talking about like, I just don't know what to do because I have a family that need me to get a job. And but i also know that i have big aspirations for what i want to do with my life my career and i'm i'm like i don't know if i should just apply for a sales engineer job and i could make you know probably more than i'm making right now technically because i was already doing it i had experience as a senior sales engineer as a founding solutions engineer all those kind of things and i i was just like talking to people i was like hey i don't know what to do and so i eventually saw that laravel was hiring and they were hiring for engineers and then customer support and i was like i'm not good enough to be an engineer people have been working level for years um i just started last year so that there was a little bit of that imposter syndrome there so i'm just gonna apply for customer support and in my mind i was like if i got this customer support role i could say i worked for laravel like this thing that i've been talking about for like yeah Yeah.

And I applied and Taylor Otwell DM'd me. Shout out Taylor. Again, we talked about him backstage. I've had the opportunity to meet Taylor at Laracon and then obviously React Miami. He, Hank, and Aaron crashed the Torque meetup we had in the hotel. I feel like he's very aware. He probably is watching. He probably tuned in briefly. Taylor, if you're watching, hey. He's very aware of people building with Laravel. I've heard a bunch of people go, he reached out to me. He DM'd me. I feel like he's great at that, which you should be as a founder. Yeah. yeah and so he dm me and like you know i was at the time in like final stages of interviews with with uh dev rel jobs in the sense of like i was like oh i get to like people are offering me jobs to do devrel for them and i was like this is crazy and then all of a sudden taylor dm me and he's like hey i saw that you uh wanted to be like customer support that's awesome like i love what you're doing uh what would you think about like coming doing like half customer support and half devrel And all of a sudden like my mind like exploded.

That's like, it's one of the things that like, yeah, exactly. I told, I told my, I told my wife, she's like, are you sure this wasn't like a scam Taylor out? Well, like it wasn't like a different account. And eventually I was like, okay, even if I, even if that never like turns into full-time dev row, which it has now, it's like, I get to be around the people that I want to do. And I get to be in the community that I want to do it in. Yeah. Well, I think too, I think I tweeted this the other day. It's crazy. I tweeted it, but then I saw some, uh, some, cause I, my, my Twitter's all over the place.

A lot of marketing, just traditional, like direct to consumer marketing, like building a brand is simple. It's posting the same thing over and over again and being known for it. Yeah. And when you become known for it, prime example, somebody mentioned it way earlier in the comments is long gone. Now at this point, you're a big taco bell fanatic. Hmm. I love Taco Bell. I love Taco Bell. My lower intestines do not. But you post about it consistently enough that every time I go to Taco Bell, which is not much, by the way, I think of you, not in a weird way. That's awesome. For example, Naz down here.

Naz is starting her journey. Naz, again, you don't know the people who see you. Naz is starting to post about Python. I love it. In my mind, guess what I know Naz as? A Python developer. Yeah. You can just be known for something. You could post about the marketing Instagram post I saw. You could post about steak and whiskey forever. Yeah. And people – you start to notice the steak and whiskey guy. We have a dear friend. He doesn't do it anymore. I keep telling him he needs to. He like wins like local craft cocktail competitions. And he's like a project management – project manager at Deloitte.

But like his thing is like craft cocktails. Like, man, like you could do a lot with this here because every – so many people love whiskey and bourbon. Just start. And you can be known for that no matter how senior or how junior you are. And the funny thing is, the two things that I'm known for, the JavaScript to Laravel and Taco Bell, most of them just started because I was like, well, almost as a joke in a lot of ways. Because the JavaScript to Laravel one was like, hey, a lot of people are usually you see the light of day and then you move to JavaScript.

And so it's like this, oh, you're doing backwards. You're doing things backwards. And so you're moving from JavaScript to Laravel. And that kind of became like a known as a joke. And the Taco Bell one, it started as a meme. I love Taco Bell. I'm not saying that this is like all fake. It started as a meme, though, because when the WordPress drama was going around, Matt Wollenberg, the CEO of WordPress, he put out this tweet about like, hey, here's all of my financial contributions. It was like donations in the last year. These are all the donations. So it was like big money, thousands of dollars.

And so I put out this tweet that it was like, here's how much I've spent. Because I had talked about a little bit about how I liked it. but not too much. And I put out this tweet of like, here's, here's my budget. Here's how much I spent at Taco Bell over the last year. And it was absurd numbers of like thousands of dollars a month and like halfway true. But then also like that, that was like probably one of my most liked and shared and commented tweets. We put out all this educational content, but then when we talk about like me as cold brew or Taco Bell, like it just blows up.

You're like, why am I even doing this? And so now it's like, it is one of those things where like, I, You, you, you become known for something, but then you're consciously aware of it as like a person. You're like, Oh yeah, it's crazy how the mind works. Yeah. It's, it's, it's wild. And now I just want to get sponsored by Taco Bell. So I love it. I have to ask what's, what's your favorite menu item. I have mine. Mine's the grilled. I think they went away with it. The grilled steak burritos. Yeah. I used to house three of them in college at one sitting.

Yeah. a lot of so i i kind of have i've tried to probably almost everything on the menu yeah sure of course at this point i had a mexican pizza the other day my wife got it it was great it i i don't care for them but every now and then they hit the spot yeah every now and then that's not my favorite my favorite is a grilled steak burrito which i don't think is around anymore i think my great cheese steak burrito that just came back oh that one's a good one i like some of their like uh seasonal items are so good like they have like these like mini tacos anything like this like the mini taco within like a little chalupa kind of show so good but my my og item that i have had since like junior high and that is still on the menu today is cheesy bean and rice burritos Are they?

They're great. They're great. Also, you got to get one of those. A hot sauce is great. Hot sauce is great. I actually saw who was it? There was like a chef. I don't know if there's this YouTube show called Last Meal. And I saw... I forget who he had on, but like it. So he's like a, like pretty good chef. And so, but he was saying, oh, it was the, the, the hot ones guy, Sean Evans. Oh yeah. He's great. Great interview style. Great interview style. He's amazing. I love it. So good. Sean Evans had on his last meal, had a crunch wrap from Taco Bell.

Good choice. Can't go wrong. But he said that the hot sauce from Taco Bell is underrated. And it's probably like, is probably one of his favorite hot sauces. Oh, I agree. I have a bottle in my fridge right now. Me too. And mild. Yeah. It's so good. We've completely derailed. All right. Back to the professional thing. But again, so my hot take with community is actually the more non-technical stuff you can talk about, the greater, you're stronger. The community is going to be. Yeah. Now that does not resonate well with upper leadership. Ooh. Okay. Yeah. Right. I mean, you can't go in these meetings and be like, Hey, our community is going to be built off cold brew and Taco Bell.

Right. But we'll go ahead. I was just thinking it's funny because I think I'm grateful that I work at Laravel for so many reasons, but I think Taylor, if you're watching, he's grateful, but no, no, it's not even a, but, but, uh, I guess it is. And I love the Laravel also leans into this, not just from a marketing standpoint, but people are known for so many things. Taylor Otwell is known for drinking a lot of Coke zero. Oh, is that his thing? I've never seen that. I know he's got a Lamborghini. I obviously got that part. I guess that's a good point too. Like orange Lamborghinis and Coke Ciros and all of a sudden like that has now become one of the, I don't know, the, the picture of Laravel in a lot of ways to internal stuff where it's like, Oh, they had a hackathon just now for the new forge just launched.

And there was pictures going through Slack. Was that y'all's AI thing? Forge is the OG Laravel product, being able to basically provision servers to be able to host Laravel. And so it relaunched with this thing called Laravel VPS, which makes you provision a server in like ten seconds. Yeah, and listen, Laravel's not paying me to say this, but they can if they want. I would highly recommend attending Laracon. I will say this with Laracon. All right. Been to a lot of tech conferences. I would say... I would say the most ideal setup for a tech conference location stage light. I mean, it was, I walked in and I was like, Oh my God.

I literally verbally was like, Holy cow. It was amazing. Great people. We felt welcome. The Torque Boys felt welcome. I mean, it's just shout out. I mean, listen, if you are anywhere, even if you're not in the Laravel ecosystem, like I'm not, I'm not a coder, but you want to go network with really cool people and learn about some tech, highly recommend Laracon. And again, I'm not being paid for it. I just love you guys a lot. All right, let's get back to some practical tactical stuff as we kind of wrap up the last thirty minutes or so. The balance of when to go above and beyond and why.

Do you want to unpack that? I'm curious where your head's at with that. Yeah, it's this. When I wrote that, the thing I was thinking about is there's this kind of two-fold aspect of when you have a job. this is like and this could be the job your dream job like i currently have right now or the job that you have and you're like i am working towards this next thing this next career yeah usually people are like i don't owe anything to my company which i think is true in a lot of ways i don't know anything to my company because like if they they don't really care about me like a company is not your family like i agree with all those premises Because I worked at a company that I did above and beyond things and they fired me.

And that's just life. That's just how it goes. But I think there are times and probably more often than not that most people don't take advantage of that you should work more than you or do things that you are not paid to do. And what I mean by that is I don't think I would have the job I have right now if I didn't do all the things that i did that i wasn't paid for on my last five jobs yeah because i would let's say um like all the video stuff that i did i learned i was like, it wasn't like I was getting paid by my job to go get cameras and then make these videos.

I'm more in my free time outside of my job, like on nights and weekends, I was like, Hey, um, I made this video and then I would take it to my job. I made this video. Could we like put this or like have our sales team use this or like put this on the support documentation? Could we use that? And all of a sudden they're like, yeah, we can, we can do that. Yeah. Um, And, but most of them were like, but you know, you're not, you, this isn't part of your job description. Like, this is not something you're doing. I'd be like, no, I'll do it on like on my, on my own time, on my free time.

And so I think there is benefit to having this balance of every time you are in a job. the things that are going to get people to take notice usually are the things that you have to do that don't, aren't in your job description. And usually that means you have to do it during non-job hours. Yeah. So this is really interesting. You're bringing us up because Mark Thompson and I got on a rant yesterday about, say what? I listened to a little bit of that. I love, I love Mark. Yeah. He's great. But we talked about essentially that, I mean, you really, you really, like, if you want to go for it, you got to go for it.

And you sometimes have to put no one to push. And, and, you know, I always compare it. I know this is not a very applicable analogy that a lot of people did not grow up sailing like I did, but sailing the whole premise around sailing, for those of you who haven't sailed before is you have to get to an, you have to get to a place and you can't get there directly. You can't sail into the winds. You have to tack, which is turning in sailing terms, back and forth up the lake to get to where you want to go. Okay. And to get there, I raced competitively for a bit.

I was not the person called the tactician. The tactician is the one that kind of monitors where the wind is going. You have to watch where the wind is going. Interesting. Not where the wind's been, but where the wind is going. Ooh, we want, we, we, I raced in a large national regardless, there's three, there's eight boats. We placed pretty much dead last the entire time. We were like the B boat. We were not good, but our tactician, uh, On the last day of the last race, saw where the wind is going, where the wind was going. We made a tactical decision and went that way, and we ended up in tenth place out of thirty eight boats.

Wow. And so it's like that for your career where you have to see where the wind's going or where it's going to potentially go and then shoot your shot. Yeah. I a hundred percent agree. Cause it's one of those things where I think about it in terms of like hobbies that you like to, for example, I, I like playing pickleball. Like I do it every, every Wednesday with, with a group of friends. And that's kind of like our, our, it's one of those that's like, it's not, I picked up golf at my old age. Golf's my thing now. See, I would love to do that.

But like most of the time, if you like doing something, usually you can't just do it during the set. A lot of times that you have to do it in a lot of ways. Like, like if I wanted to get better at pickleball and I've done this a couple of times, like I would go out and practice specific things and then like backyard, like I'm like, Hey, here, here we go. Like in my office, like just this wall right here, bam, bam. And then, but like, I think about this from like a music standpoint. So like we're, we're both musicians.

And if I was just to show up to every gig, or every weekend i play at my church like if i was just to show up that and i i'm good enough now at this point where i can do that yeah but then all of a sudden i'm not going to get to the point part that i need to be at like do you have to actually like put in the practice i think most people don't put in the practice for the job that they want and what i talked about yesterday on marks is in my opinion it's because of this oh know aaron has

talked aaron france talked about the brick i have the brick mark thompson had the brick um i i will say this and and again i said this yesterday i truly believe that the biggest blocker stopping people is their phone and essentially streaming services like netflix people like i people like i don't have people like taylor like how how do you do i've had a bunch of people i'm not bragging it's just for the conversation how do you do what you do i had one guy at torque message me he goes dude i'm single and have no kids i don't know how you do what you

do yeah and i was like i don't watch tv my wife and i are working on one tv show and we watched minutes last night yeah Like you, like that stuff, just, I was talking to Danny Thompson.

I commit your code. Right. We were talking about, I think we were talking about some Netflix show. He goes, dude, I don't got time to watch TV. I was like, I don't blame you. Right. So again, like, I feel like to get where you want to go, do you want to sit in dirty minutes and watch your favorite TV show? Or do you want to bang out a YouTube video? Nope. Nope. Yeah. And it's like, it's, it's one of those things. I do the same thing because most people ask me the same kind of question. Like, oh, you have two kids. You have three. Yeah.

About to have three. We're both are. And then like, okay, you have this job and then I have my personal YouTube channel and then I have my dreams and aspirations of where I want to take that. And then I have, you know, my personal life and I have my church life. I have a lot of things going on and I have had to cut back on so much stuff that I enjoy. Like I like playing video games, for example, and I don't think I've played a video game in like four years. But I like them. I like them. And like, same thing. Me and my wife watch probably one show, like, a forty-five minute show every night.

She falls asleep. I come into my office and I work for, you know, three hours until one, two a.m. And then I go to sleep. Then I do it all again the next morning. You don't get much sleep. I don't. Especially with kids. I get about six hours. Five to six hours every night. Okay. So not too bad. um but it's one of those things where i've learned that i need i want to give up things i think that's where i kind of started because i had to at some point especially when i was unemployed i was like okay i i have to give up doing this because i need to do other things and then there's this point that i want to give up things because then when i was unemployed again for example i Knew that I probably should spend these next three hours applying for four hundred jobs or whatever that that number.

Yeah, whatever. Right. Yeah. Or I could make one YouTube video and potentially get a job in the future, which I tweeted this yesterday. I think creating content is first round interviewing at scale. And I, I'm glad I, I'm glad I went and my wife supported me doing that. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yep. Um, last topic as we kind of wrap up here, last ten, fifty minutes of y'all. And again, thank you for the comments. I think we maybe eclipsed a two hundred fifty from Mark yesterday. This is insane. So thank y'all so much. If you have any questions, please ask them. Oh, uh, Taran asks, what do you both play?

I grew up, I grew up playing drums. So I moved up to Nashville to do drums, played the honky tonks, did studio row. I was really good in the studio because I was classically trained so I can play to a click really well. There you go. And now everyone plays with a click. So like, it's fine. Um, I, I play a guitar, a little bit of keys and then I do vocals. I sing. I love it. I love it. Um, all right, go where the people are. Find where your future employers hang out. What was the reason you wrote this? What was trickulating in the brain to make you write this?

Cause I'm curious. Yeah. I think people don't realize the value that you have, not just in creating content, but like you've talked about this so many times, of course, like the value of like actually marketing yourself. And I think one of the values of marketing yourself or one of the, like the aspects of that is you have to learn, like, who cares? First of all, like, it's crazy that people like most of the people that I knew I wanted to be hired by were not hanging out on LinkedIn, which I think LinkedIn is, of course, is still incredibly open source world. Not so much. But yeah, open source world, they weren't hanging out on LinkedIn.

And so I devoted my time as a six hundred person follower account on Twitter to be like, hey, I'm just going to talk about the things I want. I'm going to be vulnerable about the things I want. And I tried to emulate the companies that I want. I tried to emulate their voice in a lot of ways too. I'm like, I'm still going to be me. I'm still going to be unique. But when I wrote this of like hanging out with where your employers are, um, most of the time we forget that like, and again, you've talked about this so many times. So like, I love like your aspect for this.

Most of the time we forget that usually, um, a job that you're trying to get is you providing value for the company. That is the reason why they're paying you. They're like, Hey, I need to do this. I need to build a community or I need to have better YouTube videos, or I need to eventually like, uh, what Leah, who was in the chat, she was, you know, we need marketing websites built fast. And so she, she whipped up forge marketing website the past couple of days, past couple of weeks, uh, and so it's like one of those things where you get that job because that's those are the outputs that that company needs and so if you don't know what it what the company needs for an output how are you going to pitch yourself to them even if they don't have a job listing list right and so i started and this wasn't just for laravel but like a bunch of tech companies i learned that like Most of them, the reason why Aaron Francis, for example, is so popular and was so popular and had thousands of probably job offers when he was unemployed.

You're talking about YouTube followers with him. I commit your code. I was like, hey, man, how many up to now? He goes, fifty. I go, oh, fifty. Cool. That's a lot. He goes, no, fifty thousand. I was like, I know, Aaron, relax. He's like, hold on. I know you hear him talk to you. He talks like that's a lot, Aaron. No, fifty thousand. But it's like I quickly learned that I think if I was if my differential is not just me loving Taco Bell and like not just me being Jason Laravel, my differential, I wanted it to be. I create good content, high quality content for I use the word meaningful and meaningful content.

Yeah. and that was what i learned like a lot of companies like were after they wanted to not look like every other company and so what could i do to not look like every other company yep yep all right there's some questions i'm curious though i hold on i i want to i want to finish out this thought go to where people are you talking about virtual what about in person oh that's that's good that's something i didn't do well mostly because i was in a point yeah Mostly because I was at a point in my life where I couldn't. Thankfully, I love this past year.

I got to go to so many conferences. My wife hated it a little bit more than I did. But that was something that... I live in Phoenix, and there's not too much tech stuff in Phoenix. Sure. There should be more. So if you're watching and you're out there, you want to do something in Phoenix, let me know. But I think... like of course it's always it's always who you know and you're never going to know someone better than hanging out with them in person i think these few things that i did well in this area that i didn't go to conferences but i i met people like um joe privet who used to go by love joe fantastic individual love him he he lives in arizona and so we had known each other for so long and i eventually got to meet him for the first time even though we live like so close together but that that one time kind of carries us i guess like for our for our like friendship and like professional relationship kind of thing a lot of yeah and uh yeah i think most people forget the value that they have within their in-person friend group even if it's not directly related to the jobs that they want yeah Yep.

Yep. Agreed. Agreed. All right. We're getting to some questions and then we'll rapid fire. Then we will wrap it up. Heavy hitting questions today. Sebastian, Josh, what's your favorite paddle? The current favorite. That's a good question. I don't even know. So like, The one that hits the ball is Josh's favorite. I actually don't know what my paddle is. I'll have to look it up on Amazon. The funny thing is I'm one of those people that as soon as I get into a new hobby, I go all in. I literally played pickleball one time with a cheap Amazon paddle. or someone like get Yeah, let me borrow the paddle.

And then I was like, I really like this. I like that it like gets me moving a little bit. And like I usually my exercise routine is just weightlifting. So I'm like, I like a little bit of cardio. And so I researched for like hours on Reddit, YouTube, like looking at all the pickleball paddles, and I bought a pickleball paddle, like the before I played the second time I had already bought like a, you know, a pretty expensive paddle golf i i'm so i have a very like addictive personality um people would call it and like i'm trying to let golf not be that for me because a my bank account can't afford it but also b um i'm trying to like let golf like just be super fun um and like not stressful but yeah i'm that way too researching like there's already a few clubs i want to get but you I love the research aspect of the new hobby.

That's my favorite part, but it's a pro V seven carbon fiber paddle. I don't know what that is, baby. That sounds, that sounds fancy. I bet you hit that ball real good. It's got, it's got the spit. I used to play like a lot of ping pong. So like I played, I missed the days in the office. We used to, I used to play ping pong all the time in vacant. We had a ping pong table, man. I used to play all the time. This is a good question by Trey. What is more enjoyable for you? Video content or text? Like, like written content. From a, this is both from a consumption and a creation standpoint, I love video content.

I watch so much YouTube. I do too, man. I just consume the level of internet outside of YouTube. most of it's like not even like stuff that i usually create too yeah but i'm i am in the same camp as aaron francis says this as well as like if you can put a face to it usually it's better and so i even started doing this i i suck at writing um i i wanted to get better and i just couldn't find the time so in the past thirty days i did a uh every single morning i talked into a microphone for eight to ten minutes as like an audio journal and i made it like a a podcast that's great and so i i basically thought of that as like what if i could write a blog post every day for thirty days and but i can't write very well so i just i just talked and now i'm gonna turn them into blog posts but yeah so video content and my brain thinks better when i'm talking than i'm if i'm right same same um interesting question josh honest question is imposter syndrome a naughty word Honest question.

I think it's naughty in the sense of when you're thinking about imposter syndrome, when you're thinking about what you want to do, usually you're selling yourself short or you're over complicating what you're trying to do yeah and so i think that's that's when it like can become naughty it's like oh like i'm just gonna chalk it off as that it's like i would say my hot take is if you're not based off my career and when i started to experience imposter syndrome if i would say if you are experiencing imposter syndrome you're exactly where you need to be because that means you're pushing yourself if you are not feeling imposter syndrome then you're not pushing hard enough Yep.

That is my hot take on this Wednesday morning, October first. In the faith and spiritual world, most people would say like, if you're not questioning like what you actually believe, then you're probably like, you're in the right place. Amen. Amen. Absolutely. That'll preach. Give my third kidney for twenty followers. And then I'd give my left toe. We got a lot of people wanting to give up limbs for followers. But hey, I will tell you this, though. follower count because of tiktok the tiktokification of social media this is a whole another conversation around social media follower count does not matter oh yeah and it's subscriber account on youtube doesn't matter either for example like i think in and i think consistency matters more than follower count because the videos that i put out on youtube i own like i have seventeen thousand subscribers something like that super small in the grand scheme of things uh but i know there you go there you go i was super pumped past fifteen hundred finally i i love it but like i i a lot of my videos get more views consistently than channels like hundreds yeah i have thirty five thirty eight thousand followers on tick tock it doesn't it hasn't netted me one piece of business yet like it doesn't matter that's not making you three mil no no it's not uh all right cool all right sweet thanks y'all all right so we're gonna do rapid fire real quick Again, thanks, y'all, for tuning in.

I knew this was going to be a good one. This is a really good one. All right, Josh, what's one tech tool app that you can't live without and you can't say anything in the Laravel world? Tech tool app. Yeah, mobile app, website, something. Ooh, that's a good one. I'm going to say I can't live without... I can't live without Linear right now. I use Linear in my personal life. Linear is like a Trello, Jira, that kind of thing. So I use Linear for my personal app too, like for video ideas. And so I have like this Kanban board of like, hey, here's my ideas.

Here's what's being edited. Here's what I'm going to record, that kind of thing. I love it. What's the very first job you ever got paid to do? First job I ever got paid to do, probably when I was – I feel like I was an entrepreneurial spirit from very young. When I was seven years old, six years old, I went around selling sand art to my – Wow. To the three neighbor houses that we lived in in Quartzsite, Arizona. There you go. You had a lot of sand to pick from, so that's good. What did you originally want to be when you grow up, grew up, grow – What did you want to be when you were younger?

I wanted to be a stand-up comedian. i love it i love it and then i went into like actor world maybe like rock star that kind of thing which is really funny because what we do i mean we're stand-up comedians i mean i like i've had people come up to me and tell me like i've i've been compared to the nate bargatze of linkedin no no joke somebody said i'm gonna go i've also been compared to gary owen which is hilarious i love gary oh and he's pretty he's pretty raunchy but he's my i love him to death um uh what's a career mistake you're oddly grateful for Ooh, there's a lot of them.

Uh, career mistake I'm oddly grateful for is, um, I'm, I'm glad I, this is like, uh, usually I wouldn't do this. I am glad I tried so hard to get a remote job from the start. It's a terrible mistake. You should prob probably not your first job in terms of like tech should probably not be remote. yeah but i have never not worked a remote job that's awesome i mean like after chick-fil-a there you go my wife's in the other room she goes your wife does not think you're funny so there's that so um all right next question um if you weren't in tech i probably answer this but if i would wake up tell you tomorrow that you get paid the same if not more money was not a problem let's say what hobby would you pursue probably either music or i'd probably like go back to like i would i would like love making films a lot of ways not not even just like making them like like filming or directing or writing or probably a little bit of like a little bit of all three like if i could be i can't think of a good name off the top of my head but someone who who like writes directs and then stars in it it sounds very like conceited of me but yeah yeah yeah i'm gonna be a one-man show Also, John, my wife hopefully doesn't hear this.

Sounds like your wife is funny. Nope. Not at all. I think she's way funnier than I am. All right. Last question, ma'am. Oh, coffee or tea? Tea. What? Hot or iced? Iced. I drink, and this is maybe like my Arizona coming out, but I drink so much iced tea. Do you drink a lot of Arizona sweet tea because you're in Arizona? I don't even really like sweet tea, but I like Arizona tea. I'm from the South. It just gives you cavities. I used to like it a little bit when I lived in Chicago. And it's funny. In Nashville, when I went there, I have to specifically ask unsweet tea.

You have to ask for unsweet tea. And then there was this one restaurant I went in in Memphis. I asked for unsweet tea. They brought it back in this little paper cup. Everyone else got these glass cups. Some dude asked for unsweet. We don't have it. I love it. Well, at least we have the ice Bev in common. All right. Last question is called again. Thanks, y'all, for tuning in. Appreciate it. Go follow Josh. Go check what he's doing at Laravel. Show's called Guidance Counselor two point out because you had guidance counselors in middle school, high school and college. But now as adults, we don't necessarily have them give career advice.

If you go back in time until young Josh something career advice wise, what would it be? I think it would be start now in a lot of ways to be able to say, instead of just figuring out like, Oh, like most of the time we figure it out as we go. So why, like, why didn't I start earlier? I don't know. Yep. I love it. I love it. All right, y'all. Y'all have a good one. Last show of the week. Appreciate you. Next week, we'll be back next Tuesday. And I can't wait for it. Dear friend Alex Burke, he's actually in the Torque Discord. He went to Clemson.

I'm going to have to forgive him for that. But he had a lot of thoughts around hiring, what he looks for. He's a lead at a company, so I'm super excited for that conversation next Tuesday. Y'all have a good week. Josh Downs, I can say bye to you backstage. Y'all have a good one. Take it easy. Peace.