Inclusive Nerdery: The Secret Sauce of Great Teams | Podcast Awesome

What is nerdery, really? 🤓 In this episode of Podcast Awesome, we dig into the heart of Font Awesome’s culture — inclusive nerdery. It's not about lone geniuses or command line gatekeepers. It’s about heart, curiosity, humility, and building awesome things with other people. 💛

👾 You'll hear from FA team members Dave and Travis, plus a few snippets from topics we've covered on our blog and internal convos, all woven together to show how we:

🎯 Hire for character over cleverness
🔍 Celebrate deep curiosity (hello, nutrition nerds and D&D geeks!)
🎉 Create space for serious play through our legendary team "Snuggles"
🧠 Foster creativity through snack-sized projects like the Icon Wizard and Space Awesome game

This episode is for anyone building company culture, or just trying to figure out how to lead with humanity in a techy world.

✨ Icons may not change the world, but good people just might.

🔍 What You’ll Hear in This Episode:
00:00 – Welcome to Nerdery™
02:00 – Defining what "nerd" means to us
04:00 – Why we hire adults, not rockstars
06:00 – Our 3-step hiring philosophy
08:00 – Why we host company “Snuggles” (not summits!)
10:00 – FARTS, the Icon Wizard & how fun leads to innovation
12:00 – Space Awesome: building games on company time (and learning VueJS to boot!)
14:00 – Why forced culture doesn’t work
16:00 – A culture that’s built to last

🔗 Mentioned in the Episode:
🧙‍♂️ Space Awesome – FA dev project
https://spaceawesome.io/
🛠 Our Hiring Philosophy
https://blog.fontawesome.com/company-...
✨ The Icon Wizard
https://blog.fontawesome.com/icon-wiz...
💼 More About FA Company Culture
https://blog.fontawesome.com/nerdery/

🎵 Theme music by Ronnie Martin
🎹 Interstitial music by Zach Malm
🎥 Video support by Isaac Chase

Stay up to date on all the Font Awesomeness!

Transcript

[00:00:00]

Welcome to Podcast. Awesome. Where we chat about icons, design, tech, business, and nerdery with members of the Fawn. Awesome team. And today I thought we'd talk about a value that is near and dear to those of us on the Fun awesome team, which is the, is it a value, is it a trait?We're gonna be talking about Nerdery today, 

if you've listened to podcast, awesome for any amount of time, you'll know that we talk about Nerdery a lot and, having a good time and humor. It's all part of the vibe at Fawn. Awesome. And. You know, if you injected some of that into your own work culture, we think you'd benefit by that as well.

 When we talk about these kinds of traits, I know that we kind of run the risk of being a little self congratulating about how we run the company, but. You know, it really works for us and it might inform how you do your work. 

I thought it might be kind of fun to pull it all together into one place.

I have some snippets from conversations from Dave and Travis, as well as

some of the guiding principle ideas from our blogs.

We believe that tech is only as good as the culture that produces it.

for us here at fau, we think that culture is built on, true Nerdery but not in the sense of the brooding lone genius.

Or the terminal window gatekeepers,

we have in mind the kind of nerds that want to bring people in.

The kind of people who want to build obsessively together. Here's Dave with a little bit more.

Dave: We don't have the water cooler. Right. And so when we all get together the, the whole, you know, share your nerd. what are the things outside of work that you've been doing? I'm, I'm convinced that most substantive pieces of company culture come from everything. Somebody is outside of the workplace.

Everything that they do, and bring with them from home. Is where the richness and depth of culture at a company can come from, [00:02:00] we've got cycling nerds, nutrition nerds. Lord of the Rings, nerds. Star Wars nerds. We've got, we've got people who are nerd design nerds.

Nerd, right? Was it Marvel Nerds? Keyboard nerds nerd. Oh, keyboard nerd. That's fun. One. Nerds. That's fun. D and d nerd. I mean, we got use Harry, Harry Potter nerds, Harry Potter nerds. We just have, some of these are expected, right? But you might not expect that. Like somebody could be an exercise or a nutrition nerd.

it's the same process of going deep and learning everything about something to figure out how to do it best. Mm-hmm. Right. How do I, how to do this better and better every single day? Not because it's like oh, I'm not a good enough person unless I do, but because it's there and it's exciting, that's fascinating.

how do I do it better? that's what a nerd is. When we say nerd, that's what we mean. it's this kind of passion If you meet somebody, You have learned in life not to talk about those things with them. You've learned not to share that.

we wanna be a company where you are comfortable to share those things right off the bat. normally in society, you get somebody as you're talking to and they might actually start asking, you kind of lean back a little bit, and if they keep asking enough, they hit that breaking point.

You lean in and you tell them all about this amazing thing and isn't it amazing and it isn't so great, and look at this, look how amazing and wonderful and beautiful this thing is, and how can you not appreciate this? right? That's what going to a museum is where you can go and you can look and share this thing of beauty with somebody else.

Mm-hmm. It's awesome.

So we're not under any delusion that icons are gonna change the world, right? It's just a small part of what you do every day when you're building or designing something. icons aren't gonna change the world, but maybe good people will.

And that's why we have a practice of always hiring for somebody's humility over their particular skill.

At fau, we're the kind of nerds that like people.

And want to share our obsession with others because when we share, that just creates connection.

We all already know that there's enough companies out there that are building widgets and tech and gadgets.

But what it [00:04:00] seems like the world is in short supply of is companies that have an actual soul

that reflect the right kind of bottom line.

 Unfortunately, many of us already know what it's like when you hire people for their capability over trustworthiness.

You end up with a players or rockstar ninjas or whatever you call these people,

And these kind of folks tend to treat other people as obstacles, and Dave has got a thing or three to say about that.

 rock stars and a-players rock stars because of the way they get treated by others, feel enabled. Not all of them, but the system that you create around that encourages childishness and really just stupid decisions, right?

Dave: oftentimes the people that think of as the rock stars are, the children. Causing problems that the adults have to clean up, If you've got somebody high on Red Bull coding at 2:00 AM because, because hardware, whatever I like, 'cause I'm, 'cause I'm a rockstar, are typically causing more problems in the code base than they're solving 

Instead, somebody else has to come in and clean up that mess. What if instead we hired adults? What if we hired adults and we treated them that way? 'cause the truth is, so many of what other companies define as rock stars are terrible employees. But so often a lot of the employees that other companies have deemed B and C players are actually just a players currently under bad management. 

Instead of hiring the buzz wordy folks with these titles, We'd much rather hire nerds with humility,

people who value other people over smarts or tech

or money. So how do we find these kinds of nerds? Well, glad that you asked, because we have a three step process 

First of all, the who of our hiring really depends on someone's character.

We've always gravitated towards people who are trustworthy and who like people.

Secondly, we're always looking for folks who are voracious learners always gobbling up knowledge because

 the very act of learning [00:06:00] something new inherently involves someone saying, I don't know.

And third, we look for people who are not above grunt work.

And when you take this sort of approach to hiring in your company, it really informs the entire team.

And if we're spending this much time, these many hours with these folks that we work with. It makes sense that you would hire somebody that is fun to be around and who has a good character, right? Somebody who's not full of themselves seems reasonable to me.

And when it comes to play in the workplace, we think that play is very serious business.

And we do this in a lot of different ways, one of the ways that we foster this is our biannual snuggle, 

Dave: it is such an absurd word. I think that's really what it's for adults to use. Yeah. For something that is work related and like very work, you know, like Right. Like, uh, it should 

Matt: be the quarterly sync people. 

Dave: Yeah. Right. And, and in an effort to like, to, to make fun of and, and make, just make fun of businesses to begin with.

Right. To make fun of businessing to begin with. Uh, let's go with like an absolutely ridiculous name for this, right? Because, because here's why too, is that this ridiculousness is actually what this is about. That we know from experience, from intuition and from experience that the best remote work happens.

When it is foundationally based on, in, in-person human relationships. Mm-hmm. Right? That you need to build those face-to-face. The way that we are wired as human beings, we need to be face-to-face for some amount of time. Right. 

The way that we can actually have that trust.

we always get. Work done when we're at these meetups, but really it's about connecting with one another and we make a lot of space for having fun together. We go ax [00:08:00] throwing. have Marathon DD campaigns, karaoke nights, and eat a whole lot of good food.

And when you're a fully remote company and everybody's working in different time zones, you're working asynchronously, you're working a lot through email or Slack, and that's a medium of communication that can feel a little cold or sterile.

And inevitably these forms of communications don't always come across really well, and we get together and remember how much we like these people and that it's actually human communications happening on the other side.

it's kind of hard to measure this, but. We really get a sense that this sort of playfulness encourages creativity among the team

And one of the ways that we see this creativity play out is we always set aside a little bit of time for snack activities which is just a small project.

Maybe something we've been wanting to get to for a while, but it's not really a mission critical kind of thing, but sort of a nice to have.

But what we notice is when there's sort of a, fun aspect that feels really free, you can recruit other team members and before you know it, you've got a full on project. the Icon Wizard is a really great example of that.

Matt: Here's Jory, Mike, and Ed, talking about the comedic beginnings of that particular project. This project known as the Icon Wizard was originally, uh, farts.

So what's that about? Internal code name? Internal code name acronym, 

Jory: font. Awesome. Reusable 

Matt: tidbits. And just moments before the announcement went out, we decided. Maybe we should be a little bit more professional. 

Jory: Yeah. Did you, ed, did you, when you were, uh, coding up the actual little widget on the button, did it ever actually say farts?

Ed: Um, I, I don't think so. Say yes. Yeah. Say yes. Say yes. Absolutely. That's right. 

https://youtu.be/IpgwIf0vqXQ?si=ufZgHRO8bfgUMxsQ And [00:10:00] throughout the year, the way that we structure our work together is sort of based loosely on the 37 Signals, Basecamp method of six weeks splits, 

And sometimes we take that as an opportunity for ongoing learning or a fun project.

And a good example of that would be Ed Emmanuel's space. Awesome project. 

Ed: space Awesome is the only thing that I've actually released.

Matt: And the great thing is that you were able to do that on, on company time. 

Ed: Oh, yeah, yeah. During. 

Matt: During our cool down, we'll have our six week splits and then we have two weeks where we may be cleaning up projects, or sometimes it's self development stuff, 

 you and Travis had been talking and you knew you needed to learn view. And he is like, well, why don't you build a game and that'll give you a chance to learn it.

Ed: Yeah, absolutely. Um, he kind of, uh, fueled that idea. Um, and I spent, oh, most of the, most of my cool downs over the course of a year or so. Increasing my knowledge about VUJS, but also building space. Awesome.

You can actually check that out and play it now if you want.

And if you wanna learn more about that project, we've written about it on our blog.

 Now with all this talk of company culture, it can get pretty cringey and eye roll worthy pretty quick.

And we've seen when companies are trying a little bit too hard and sort of cram it in, right? their idea of creating company cultures, having like a, 

multicultural food potluck once a year, right?

And it ends up feeling like a little bit forced, like this program that HR put together, meant to fuel and boost creativity.

Kind of like your, uh, boss's idea of, Friday is Hawaiian shirt and jeans day.

Lumberg: Oh, and remember, next Friday is Hawaiian shirt [00:12:00] day. So you know, if you want to go ahead and uh, wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.

Yeah, no thanks Loberg.

and smart people can smell this stuff. A mile away. You can't like force a playful fund culture in the workplace if leadership is insincere or you don't have freedom to fail and learn from that failure.

In companies that are making a business case for fostering healthy culture.

They're really fooling themselves

If your company decides to have a value that doesn't have anything to do with actual dollars, it's always gonna cost you something.

because it's gonna cost something, the leadership is gonna have to get really thoughtful about how to build their business in a sustainable way.

the way this all comes together is the kind of company that you build is gonna be reflected in the brand and how people perceive you externally.

So again. Icons aren't gonna change the world, but they help people build websites a little more easily. That's our hope anyway,

really here at F. Awesome. It is about the people

that makes working here so meaningful.

 inclusive nerdery isn't just a tactic,

it's a foundation for building a company that lasts.

All right, so I'd say that about wraps, this edition of podcast. Awesome. If there's something in this particular episode that sparked interest or got the wheels turning and you think a coworker or colleague might benefit from its message,

why don't you just copy the URL right now and send it to him?

A, now it's time to roll The credits, as always, podcast. Awesome. Was produced and edited by this guy right here, Matt Johnson. The podcast awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin. And the video episodes [00:14:00] get a little extra helping hand from Isaac Chase.

And if you follow what we do here at Podcast Awesome. On the social medias. We'd love to hear from you, like what works at your company, how do you think about culture building, what works, what doesn't work?

But most of all. Go make something awesome.