Jason Torres

The Architecture of a Year: Why I Built FullCircle

Time is our only non-renewable resource. I realized that.....

Freshman Year: My 2025 Debut in Tech

People say a long career in film prepares you for a lot...

Building Holiday Magic with AI: The 2025 Santa Tracker

Resurrecting a family tradition with an 8-bit Santa Tracker powered by real-time AI voice orchestration.

The Tech Conference That Wasn't Selling Anything

Reflections on community over commerce and why the best events feel less like sales pitches.

How I built this portfolio

A look under the hood of this site using Laravel, Tailwind, and a minimal design philosophy.

Robot Overlord Approved Resumes in 2025!

Taylor and I have spent so much time on this, and I've got to share what we've learned. After looking at hundreds of resumes, collaborating on countless reviews, watching hours of video content from greats like Anthony Mays and Symone B, and getting ...

Oct 01, 2025

I like Cookies and I like Christmas, and hey Datastax is pretty cool too. so lets build something.

Overview HEY HEY and happy holidays yall. When I heard Datastax was doing a 12 days of Codemas challenge, well you KNOW your boy had to take a crack at it. What better way to do that than a Christmas Cookie Recipe Finder! It’s a web application that ...

Dec 23, 2024

The Double-Edged Sword of AI in Software Development

Where do we go from here? Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a pivotal tool in software development, reshaping how developers work and approach projects. With AI tools automating mundane tasks and generating complex code snippets, efficiency and...

Oct 15, 2024

The one where I was a speaker: THAT Conference 2024.

My Experience at That Conference 2024 Hey everybody, I'm super excited to share with you the incredible journey of attending my first ever THAT conference in late July 2024 in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. Not only was it my first time attending, but I...

Aug 09, 2024

Reflecting on the #TechCommute: Season 3 Journey's

Hey everybody, Jason here. As we wrap up the third season of the Tech Commute, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to our incredible community. It's been a wild ride with its fair share of highs and lows, but your unwavering support for Jacob and ...

Jul 05, 2024

You have a message (from Appwrite)

NOW AVAILABLE on Cloud!!! Be sure to checkout this and many new features in 1.5 here Hey hey! Ever wonder how those handy messages pop up on your phone, whether it's a notification about a great deal or a reminder for an event? Well, it's all thanks...

Apr 06, 2024

Win the blog game with Headless Hashnode!

HELLO THERE! The blogging game is constantly changing, and creators are seeking more control and flexibility over their online presence. Headless Hashnode emerges as a powerful solution, allowing you to build a custom blog while leveraging the conten...

Feb 11, 2024

Setting Up Clerk in 5 Minutes

Hate recording audio? Same here! But sometimes, it's the best way to capture raw, unscripted thoughts. That's why I'm diving into this blog post to share my experience setting up Clerk in Next.js in just 5 minutes. Buckle up, it's going to be a piece...

Jan 12, 2024

Networking and Soft Skills for developers

In the film industry, where creativity intersects with technical skills, I spent 15 years crafting visual stories and honing my craft. After deciding to retire from film, I found myself drawn to a new narrative — one written in code. (I feel like I h...

Dec 15, 2023

filmmaking === codeMaking

Hey all! Some of you are already aware of my background, but for those of you who aren’t here ya go: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3360023/ Yes, that’s me and after spending 15 years fully immersed in the multifaceted landscape of the film industry, I ...

Nov 07, 2023

I Wasn't Even Looking. That's Why It Worked.

I've been watching the job market do something ugly lately. Layoffs. Hiring freezes. People with ten solid years of experience posting "Open to Work" and hearing nothing back for months. And I HAVE thoughts. Because I just went through a transition myself, Torc to JetBrains, and the way it happened directly contradicts some of the stuff conventional wisdom says about getting hired. I wasn't looking. 1. Why I Left (The Real Version) Let me be honest about something, because the polished career-change post isn't what this newsletter is for. I was on a contract at Torc. No benefits. I have kids. At a certain point, that math stops working no matter how much you love the work and I genuinely loved the work. taylor desseyn , my former boss and my partner in crime, is one of the best teachers I've had in this career. We talked about this stuff every single day. We built a community together that I'm proud of in a way I struggle to put into words. Leaving that was hard. It's still a little hard. We talk all the time but it's different you know how it is when you've built something real with someone and then you're just not in the building anymore. But I also had to be honest with myself. I never intended to be in staffing long term. I'm a developer at heart. Getting back to building, to code, to tools that developers actually use, that pull never went away. And then the interviews started happening, and I started seeing my own value reflected back at me in a way that made it clear: it was time to grow. Staying comfortable when you know it's time to move is its own kind of dishonesty. The hardest part wasn't finding a new job. It was accepting that it was okay to go. 2. The Always-Be-Interviewing Rule (No, Not What You Think) Here's something Taylor and I preached inside the Torc community constantly: interview even when you're happy. Not because you're disloyal. Not because you're restless. Because you cannot give honest advice about a job market you haven't been inside recently. If you're helping developers navigate their careers and you haven't sat across from a hiring manager in two years, you're just recycling old maps. So I interview. Apple, Laravel, PayPal, JetBrains. And here's what I want you to understand about how every single one of those conversations started: none of them came from a job board. None of them came from a recruiter cold email. Every one of them started with casual connections. Chatter on socials, showing up in the right spaces, being a real person (cue "i'm a real boy) in conversations that had nothing to do with employment. I didn't apply to any of these places until I had already spoken to someone on the inside. The relationship came first. The application came after. That's not a strategy I cooked up, it's just what happens when you've been consistently visible and genuinely present long enough that when a role opens up, someone thinks of you before the job post even goes live. And here's the wildly ironic part: the skills that got their attention were the ones I'd built at Torc ! The same ones we used every day to help other people get hired. People were coming for the exact thing I'd been building. I just hadn't been building it for them. 3. The 24-Hour Livestream That Changed Everything Last Christmas, I ran a 24-hour livestream. Jan-Niklas Wortmann from JetBrains was one of the participants. He didn't see a polished portfolio. He didn't read a carefully curated LinkedIn summary. He watched me work in real time, for hours, live. After that, he reached out and suggested I apply for a role on his team. I did. That is what "building in public" actually means — and it's something Taylor and I lived together. It is not posting your wins. It is not a brag thread. It is being so consistently visible doing the actual work that the right people eventually can't miss you. The stream wasn't a job-hunt strategy. It was just something I do. Because it's what we do. 4. The PayPal Decision (And What I Did With It) By the time the JetBrains process got moving, I already had a signed offer from PayPal on the table. And here's something a lot of people don't know they're allowed to do: I took that offer directly to JetBrains and was transparent about where I stood. I wasn't playing games. I told them the situation honestly I had an offer, I had a start date, and I was genuinely interested in their role. JetBrains responded by expediting my entire interview process to meet my deadline. They felt it was worth moving fast to find out. And it worked. The PayPal offer was real and we took it seriously. Hybrid role, three days a week in Austin, Texas. I live in New York. My uncle lives in Austin and had space for me to crash. We actually sat down and tried to make it work. We crunched the numbers, mapped out the flights, talked through what week to week would actually look like. And on paper you could almost convince yourself it was doable. But when we stopped trying to make it work on paper and started thinking about what it would actually feel like six months in. The burnout, the time away from my kids, the toll on my family, back and forth every single week (woof). It wasn't a logistics problem anymore. It was a quality of life problem. And no salary makes that math MATH when you're being honest about it. It was a genuinely hard choice. PayPal is a great company and it was a real opportunity. But hard doesn't mean wrong. JetBrains came in higher and 100% remote. But I want to be clear ...WE CONSIDERED IT. We just knew. The leverage only existed because I was transparent. I didn't hide the competing offer hoping to play both sides. I put it on the table honestly and let both companies make informed decisions. That's not a negotiation tactic. That's not a negotiation tactic. That's just being a straight shooter, and straight shooters tend to get treated like adults. 5. What This Has to Do With the Market You're In Right Now Here's what I keep watching: the people struggling hardest right now are the ones who only started building visibility when they needed a job. Starting from zero in the worst conditions, wondering why nobody is responding. The people landing in a brutal market are the ones who've been consistently showing their work not as a tactic, but as a practice. The campfire has to be burning before you need people to show up. Also, I want to be specific about what I mean by that, because "build in public" has become its own kind of empty advice. I'm not talking about posting. I'm talking about a track record. Real people who have watched you work, over time, showing up in the same spaces, doing the thing repeatedly not just announcing it. Jan-Niklas saw a 24-hour stream and watched me actually do the work. The folks at Apple, Laravel, PayPal.... none of those conversations started with me applying. They started because people I had been in rooms with, real and virtual, already knew what I was about before I ever sent a resume. That's the network that matters. Not the follower count. Not the connection requests. The people who have watched you long enough to vouch for you without being asked. If you're waiting until you're unemployed to become visible, you're already behind. If you're only interviewing when you have to, you don't actually know what the market values right now. And if you're only building in public when you have something to announce that's not building in public. That's a press release. The track record is the asset. Start building it before you need it. The Bottom Line: You don't need to be looking to be findable. Interview when you're comfortable so you know what comfortable actually means. Build in public as a standard, not a strategy. Be transparent in your process with companies, with your network, with yourself. And when it's time to grow, give yourself permission to go even when what you're leaving actually mattered. Especially then. Shoutout to Taylor Desseyn. Everything I'm describing in this newsletter, we talked about at a campfire you helped build. I'm just carrying the fire somewhere new. This week's question: Are you interviewing right now ? even if you're not looking? When's the last time you did? Hit reply. A human who has thought about this way too much will actually read it.

Hey, you’re a Data Pro, So Why Does Your Resume Suck at Data?

Welp, I just got back from DataTune 2026, and you are NOT gonna believe this, but I HAVE some thoughts. It was my last in-person event before moving on to my next chapter, and we spent the time doing back-to-back resume reviews. After looking at dozens of profiles, I noticed one blaringly obvious, borderline ironic theme: People who get paid to analyze and pull data for a living are absolutely terrible at giving data about themselves. 1. The Cobbler’s Shoes (Data Edition) It’s the classic "cobbler’s children have no shoes" scenario. We saw brilliant data engineers and analysts who can build complex pipelines and beautiful dashboards, yet their resumes were a desert of vague bullet points like "Responsible for data analysis" or "Collaborated with stakeholders." If you can’t quantify your own impact, why should a hiring manager trust you to quantify their business? In a world of AI slop, a resume without hard data is just noise. 2. The Kelsey Hightower Formula: Action > Impact It reminds me of a great conversation I had with Kelsey Hightower when he came and did resume reviews with me once. He put it quite succinctly: "Action > Impact." It’s a simple, high-value framework: what did you actually do, and what was the specific result? If you aren't connecting your daily tasks to a measurable outcome, you're missing the "gold" in your history. It’s the ultimate way to put data points in a resume that actually mean something to a human on the other side. 3. Stop Being Vague, Start Being "Necessary" We talk a lot about Ikigai—that intersection of what you love and what the world needs. Right now, the world needs people who can prove their value with evidence. Whether you’re at the beginning, middle, or end of your journey, your resume needs to reflect the "Kintsugi gold" of your career—the specific, data-backed wins that make you unique. Don't say: "Improved database performance." Do say: "Reduced query latency by 40% using [Specific Tool], saving the team 10 hours of manual labor per week." 4. This is Why the Torc Community Matters This irony is exactly why we lean so hard into our community reviews. Sometimes you’re too close to your own "onion" to peel it back properly. You need a peer—someone at the campfire—to look at your work and say, "Hey, you forgot to mention that you saved the company $50k last quarter." At Randstad Digital | Torc , we aren’t just a megaphone for jobs; we’re a relationship engine designed to help you upscale and present the best, most data-driven version of yourself. The Bottom Line: The tech landscape is shifting, and "gliding through with military precision" isn't enough anymore. You need to be your own best data analyst. At the end of the day, no matter what part of the journey you are on—whether you're just starting out, grinding through the middle, or looking for your next big exit—there is always a community here for you at Torc. Don't let your resume be "AI slop." Head over to the Torc Discord, drop your resume in the review channel, and let’s help you find the gold in your cracks. What’s one metric from your current job you’re actually proud of? Hit reply and tell me—I promise a human (who loves data) will read it.

Nobody Learns Anything From a Hot Take

There's a content format that's taken over Developer Relations LinkedIn and I can't stop watching it burn. You know the one. "Things people say in DevRel vs. what they actually mean.🔥" "Here's why your conference budget is completely wasted.💰" "Unpopular opinion: most DevRel teams shouldn't exist.🥑" The comments go crazy. Practitioners either nod furiously or get defensive. Someone writes "this is exactly my situation." Someone else writes "this is reductive and you clearly don't understand enterprise Developer Relations." The poster responds to both with "love the discussion, this is why I post." Nobody fixes anything. Nobody learns anything. The cycle repeats next week with a slightly different hook. 1. The irony is almost too good The whole premise of this content is that Developer Relations has a measurement problem. Companies chase vanity metrics — t-shirt pickups at a conference booth, Discord MAUs, blog views — instead of asking whether any of it actually moved the product forward. But the posts criticizing this behavior are themselves vanity metrics plays. Engineered for maximum reaction, minimum accountability. The "engagement" they generate is the same thing they're criticizing: people feeling something, then going back to doing exactly what they were doing before they opened the app. "Our docs are comprehensive." Translation: our docs are 400 pages and nobody can find the quick start. The comment section lights up. 800 reactions. "This is literally my company lol." The poster writes a follow-up next week about something else that's broken. Nobody updated the docs. 2. A hot take is not a diagnosis "Your conference strategy is a $40K mailing list" might be true. But the response to that isn't a witty post — it's sitting down with whoever approved the spend and asking what success was supposed to look like before the booth got bought. Hot takes describe symptoms. They don't do the hard work of finding the root cause, and they definitely don't stick around for the fix. 3. The discourse has the same problem as the thing it's criticizing Here's what I keep coming back to: the Developer Relations industry has a strategy problem. Companies hire Developer Relations reactively. They measure it wrong, or don't measure it at all. They wonder why it's not moving a number nobody named in the first place. The LinkedIn content about this problem has the exact same structure. Posted reactively. Optimized for engagement over outcomes. No agreement on what "useful" looks like before it goes out. I've shipped enough content to know this pattern from the inside. It feels like work. It has metrics. It is not the same as being useful. 4. What actually useful looks like A useful post about conference strategy would include: how one team defined success criteria before buying the booth, what they tracked during the event, and what they changed the next time. That post gets 40 likes. The hot take version gets 400. That gap is the whole problem. If you want to fix Developer Relations , pick one thing, go one level deeper than "here's what's broken," and tell me what you actually changed. I will read that every time. This week's question: Have you ever actually changed something at work because of a LinkedIn post? I'm genuinely asking. Hit reply.

Oops, That Was Just Marketing in a Hoodie.

I just got done reading Dewan A. 's Why Are We Paying These Folks — A Tale of DevRel, and I HAVE some thoughts. Spicy ones. Because I happen to know of companies — right now, in 2026 — that are letting go of entire DevRel teams. Not one person. The whole team. And everyone is shaking their heads going "wow, DevRel keeps taking hits." But I want to offer a different read on what's actually happening. 1. Those Weren't DevRel Teams I'll say what people are thinking but won't put in writing: most of those companies didn't have real DevRel in the first place. They had marketers with "advocate" in their title. People with big followings and zero production code to their name. Dewan puts it bluntly — a developer advocate is an experienced engineer who acts as a trusted voice between the company and the community. Not a content creator. Not an influencer. A builder. And as Angie Jones writes: "Developer advocates have to build and maintain credibility with their engineering peers, understand their pain points, and foresee how given solutions would address their needs. Without engineering experience, this is hard to do." So when those teams get cut — it's not a tragedy for DevRel. It's an audit. The community already knew. Leadership just finally caught up. 2. DevRel Looked Glamorous So Everyone Wanted In Here's the uncomfortable part. There's been a wave of people treating DevRel as a side door into tech. No technical background? No problem. Big LinkedIn following? Great, you're hired. Developers have a sixth sense for people who are faking it. They will ask you a deep technical question in the Q&A and if you don't actually know the answer — not "looked it up once" know, but built something with it know — the trust is gone. Instantly. Forever. No amount of great content saves you from that moment. Jono Bacon said it best in the foreword of Mary Thengvall 's DevRel book: "Developer Relations is a remarkably nuanced, complex, and context-specific discipline." You can't shortcut nuance. You earn it or you don't. 3. Okay But Where Do I Stand (The Idiot Weighs In) I'm a Community Manager. Not a Developer Advocate. Dewan's article is clear those are different things — and he's right. I'm not out here fielding Kubernetes questions. But the credibility principle is the same regardless of title: you have to have done the thing. My credibility doesn't come from a compiler. It comes from showing up, from the mentor program that crashed and burned, from the messy behind-the-scenes reality of building something that actually matters. You earn trust by showing your work — including the parts that didn't work. 4. The Reckoning Is a Feature, Not a Bug Real DevRel — built on technical credibility and genuine community trust — is hard to cut. Because when you cut it, developers notice immediately and they get loud about it. As Dewan puts it: "DevRel is the only team at your company that can speak the engineer's language, provide regular feedback to the product team, function as a marketing team, and grow the community as the face of your company." If your entire DevRel team got eliminated and nobody in the developer community said a word? That tells you everything about what was actually being built. The Bottom Line: The DevRel layoffs aren't proof that DevRel doesn't work. They're proof that a lot of companies were doing it wrong from the start — and the bill just came due. Have you watched a DevRel or Community program fail from the inside? What was the real reason? drop a comment!

The Human Advantage: Why 2026 is the Year of the Person (Not the Bot)

In a time where "AI-powered" is the prefix to LITERALLY every product, email, and toaster, it’s easy to feel like we’re being coded out of the equation. We’ve spent the last few years marveling at what LLM's and MCP and such can do. But as we move deeper into 2026, the trend lines are showing something surprising. I recently read a report from Higher Logic titled: THE FUTURE OF COMMUNITY: 2025 TRENDS EVERY COMPANY NEEDS TO WATCH The more I read, and got through their points, which I fully agree with and have been doubling down on all of 2025, the more I realized that, the more automated the world becomes, the more humanity becomes a premium luxury. Being a human in tech right now is actually pretty cool. Why? Because the "Robot Revolution" has finally hit the one wall it can’t climb: Trust. The "Nuance" Gap An AI can summarize 1,000 forum posts in three seconds. It can tell you the average sentiment or the top three features users want. But it cannot tell you why a specific user felt frustrated, or understand the "unspoken" context of a niche industry workflow. As the latest trends show, customers are starting to experience AI Fatigue. They don’t just want an answer; they want a peer-validated answer. They want to know that the person giving the advice has actually sat in the chair, faced the deadline, and felt the stress of a system crash. Robots have data; humans have scars and stories. Community: The One Thing Robots Can’t Build We often talk about "building" a community like we’re building software. But communities aren’t built—they are grown. Things a robot can't do: Empathize with a struggle: It can simulate empathy, but it can’t be an ally. Identify a "Super User": It can track stats, but it can’t spot the passion, the humor, or the leadership qualities that turn a community member into a "Torcer" or a brand advocate. Create "The Vibe": Culture is the result of thousands of messy, funny, and sometimes heated human interactions. You can’t prompt an algorithm to "make people feel like they belong." Make an excellent pizza: Truthfully I can't either so the jury is out on that one. Our New Role: The Curators of Truth "We see the community as a place where users discuss more complex and unique use cases, things that might not be covered in a traditional support site. That’s how we’re thinking about AI, not just AI for the community, but AI powered by the community." Aily Roper -Senior Manager of Customer Education at Bluebeam The future of tech isn't humans vs. robots; it’s humans using robots to clear the "busy work" so we can do the high-value work: Connecting. The data is pretty clear, companies with active, human-led communities see higher retention and better products. Why? Because a community is a living, breathing "knowledge moat." A competitor can scrape your website, and they can even copy your AI chatbot, but they cannot copy the 12,000 humans who trust each other inside your ecosystem. "People will start to crave human connection. And communities will be a great place to make that happen." Nicole Saunders - Senior Director of Customer Experience Marketing The Bottom Line If you’re feeling a bit "automated out" lately, remember this: AI is the tool, but WE are the advantage. The secret sauce to all of this—the trust, the nuance, and the real growth—is and has always been you, the people. In a world of infinite, cheap, generated content, the most valuable thing you can offer is your unique, authentic, human perspective. It’s a great time to be a person. Now get out there and go person it up!