0:00:08

Matt

Welcome to Podcast Awesome. In this series of Nerd Show and Tell episodes, we chat with members of the Font Awesome team, take a deep dive into some of their recent work, and share the Nerdy interest that enriched their lives.

0:00:29

Matt

I'm your host Matt Johnson, and today we're talking with senior developer Ed Emanuel. In this Nerd Show and tell, ed tells us about work related to the Icon wizard project and shares his love for 3D printers and DND.

0:00:48

Matt

Well, hey, Ed, thanks for hanging out at the Nerd Show and Tell.

0:00:56

Ed

Yeah, thanks for having me.

0:00:57

Matt

I'm curious about your role as Font Awesome and the path for how you got here.

0:01:02

Ed

I started programming when I was very young, like 12-13 years old. I just really loved computers and started reading some programming manuals because we had an old TSR 80, which didn't really have much of anything on it back.

0:01:18

Matt

In the days when the storage was a cassette tape.

0:01:21

Ed

Yeah, exactly.

0:01:22

Matt

Nice.

0:01:23

Ed

So I ended up going to Missouri Southern and getting a degree in computer science. After I graduated, I got a programming job and just I've spent the last 25 years or so programming. I love it. It's pretty crazy to think about the amount of time I've had in my career and how I'm really still not bored of it. I love doing it every day.

0:01:52

Matt

And you have a background with Dave and Travis, the founders of Font Awesome.

0:01:56

Matt

Right.

0:01:57

Ed

Travis and I worked together at a company called Ligett and Platt. We worked there together for about five years, got to know each other, became good friends, and then after we both left there, we had some other jobs, did some other things. Eventually, Travis started and Dave started. Font Awesome. And then I was coming to the end of a job that I had for, like, seven years, and things were kind of getting a little rocky there.

0:02:27

Ed

Travis invited me to come to Font Awesome.

0:02:29

Matt

Yeah, it seems like a common theme with folks that come to Font Awesome. They kind of get chewed up a little bit out in the professional world where they're like, I don't think I want to do this. And then when folks wind up at Font Awesome, it seems like a common thing, like, okay, I don't ever want to go back to that again.

0:02:47

Ed

Yeah, there is a lot of programming jobs out there that are not great not great environments because of, well, could be how the company is ran or could be just a whole lot of factors.

0:03:01

Matt

But now that I think of it, you did some work with Mike Wilkerson. When we were at our Snuggle, it seemed like there was a lot of excitement there, kind of watching you guys work together.

0:03:12

Matt

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

0:03:13

Ed

During the Snuggle, a lot of times we try to come up with some small projects to work on. We like those to be kind of fun things, the snack TVs, but also yeah, we call them snack activities. It being fun is great. Also it being useful is that's a great bonus, too. And Mike and I have been talking for a while about he's doing a lot of stuff with actually processing the graphics icons and stuff, all the svgs.

0:03:43

Ed

And we got to talking about how we could take existing icons and kind of layer on some modifiers. We already have some of these icons available on the site, but our designers actually had to build them. So like a user with a circle and a plus in the corner or other symbols down in the corner, a.

0:04:07

Matt

Check mark or minus a slash mark.

0:04:10

Ed

Yeah, or a slash to the icon, those kind of things. And so we started experimenting around with things and over the course of the week managed to get up a working prototype where you could select an icon and then you'd have a list of these modifiers and you could just click on one of the modifiers and it would take that icon and that modifier and combine them together into a single Svg. That then we could let you add to your kit on Font Awesome and then be able to use that on your own website.

0:04:46

Matt

And that sort of bumps up the number of icons. Ludicrous, how many more icons possibilities that is. Have you guys done the math on that?

0:04:55

Ed

We did calculations a couple of times. I don't remember — it’s a whole lot of icons. I think right now we have like about twelve modifiers and I can't remember the number of icons we have, but whatever that number is, you get to multiply it basically by twelve. At this point in time, I think we've got another bunch of modifiers we're going to add to. So the final number might be 20 or 30 different modifiers, which is going to make us have even more and more iPhones.

0:05:26

Matt

Yeah.

0:05:26

Matt

So currently it's about 19,000 icons that we have. And Font Awesome Pro times twelve —  plus. That's a lot of icons.

0:05:38

Ed

Yes.

0:05:39

Matt

That's really cool. So were there any challenges that you guys had when you were building that? Any hurdles that you had to get over?

0:05:45

Ed

Yeah, so there's a lot. Mike doing all actual image processing, taking basically two svg paths and kind of trying to combine them together and create rules and stuff around those so that you get the output you're looking for. Beyond that, there's also like the user interface for this. What should this look like? How do we make it easy for a user to use and understand what they're getting? So we spent a week during the Snuggle working on the features and getting kind of the prototype together and the basics and stuff. And then during our cooldown, I actually started polishing all of that work and getting the UI built and stuff.

0:06:34

Ed

And one of the other members of our team. Francis has spent a lot of time kind of helping dress that up and build the UI out and all that stuff. And it looks great, and I think our users are going to love it. It's going to be a really cool feature that I think is going to help a lot of people.

0:06:54

Matt

Yes, I'm looking forward to seeing that launch and adding some other categories. We talked about, jokingly talked about adding a heavy metal category where I scoured through all of the icons and thought which ones are most heavy metal. So that'll be fun to also include that in that chunk of work. And if I've got it my way, I've got some plans for some pretty great work related to that. We'll see how it goes.

0:07:38

Matt

Is there anything in the world of tech these days that's piqued your interest? Maybe outside of development or even within development? Like something you kind of keep an eye on the news headlines?

0:07:48

Ed

I spend a lot of time messing with my 3D printer. I have both an Fdm printer and a resin printer. Pretty much constantly keeping stuff printing. I have mostly print DND, Minis and Terrain and stuff like that, which is super fun.

0:08:09

Matt

I don't know anything about 3D printing. So where do you get, like, the I mean, how does that work for somebody who doesn't understand that? You get some kind of schematic for a figure and then the printer creates it. How does that even work?

0:08:25

Ed

There's several websites out there where you can get the models for it. Probably the biggest one where you can get stuff for free is thingiverse. And there's also a lot of content creators that on Patreon and other sites like that where they release new models every month and you pay them 510, $15, whatever, and you get all of the models for that month. And then you just take those models and you run them through a piece of software.

0:08:54

Ed

Typically one of the most common ones is Cura. It's just a piece of software. You drop the models in there and then you do some settings and click a few buttons. And then it gives you an output that you copy onto a thumb drive and you plug it into your printer and you go hit print. And then you wait a few hours, or sometimes a couple of days, depending on how big it is. And you have your model.

0:09:19

Matt

It's amazing the world of technology we're living in. And they said that we'd have flying cars by now, but at least we can print physical objects. So that's pretty cool.

0:09:31

Ed

That is very cool. I love it.

0:09:34

Matt

I remember the days of playing D and D as a youngster, and it used to be those what was the metal material? It's probably pewter.

0:09:44

Matt

Yeah.

0:09:44

Ed

Pewter, yeah.

0:09:45

Matt

Those really heavy miniatures and just spending hours painting those things with a magnifying glass and trying to get the details just right. Do you like painting them too?

0:09:55

Ed

Oh, yeah. I paint stuff all the time. I have a huge backlog of things that need painted, but painting is a great stress reliever. It's very relaxing. I can just turn on an audiobook and sit down there and paint for an hour or two and just kind of shut out the world and focus on this little project that it's just relaxing.

0:10:31

Matt

So onto the deep, important questions. Is there an icon or an icon, theme or category that you think is missing from the Fun Awesome canon?

0:10:42

Ed

Don't think we have one that's specifically just RPG. I know we have a gaming category.

0:10:48

Matt

Yeah.

0:10:49

Ed

But we don't have anything that's like, a little more narrowly focused just around pen and paper RPGs.

0:10:57

Matt

If you had it your way, what kind of icons that fit into that category would make it in?

0:11:03

Ed

Well, I think we have a 20 sided dice that belongs in there. We have some swords, axe, the wizards hats. We have a bunch of icons, the cloak, the skull, stuff like that. I think there's probably definitely a few icons we could add along those lines. Some more d and D themed things. Oh, we have a dragon icon already, but I think there's some other monsters that would be cool to add some kind of slime or gelatinous cube or a beholder, but I suppose we couldn't call it a beholder.

0:11:40

Matt

Could add a bag of holding in there. I wonder how you would visually represent that.

0:11:45

Ed

Maybe a bag icon with an infinity symbol in the corner.

0:11:49

Matt

Yeah, there you go. Exactly.

0:11:50

Ed

Well, there's another modifier.

0:11:52

Matt

Yeah, there you go, the infinity modifier. Do you have any favorite font Awesome icons?

0:11:58

Ed

I am very particular to the retro rocket, the pixelated rocket one, because of Space Awesome, and I really like a lot of the space icons as well that are in that category for Space.

0:12:11

Matt

Yeah.

0:12:12

Matt

You spent a lot of time with those icons.

0:12:13

Ed

Yeah, I did.

0:12:14

Matt

Which segues into some of the stuff that you're kind of doing outside of regular work rhythms. So a couple of months ago, you launched Space Awesome for maybe folks that haven't heard about that. What was that project about?

0:12:29

Ed

So I built a browser based game using mostly Font Awesome icons for the graphics, and it was a fun project. I used it to learn Vue.Js, and it's out there on the Web if you want to play it. It's pretty cool.

0:12:47

Matt

Yeah.

0:12:47

Matt

How did the launch go?

0:12:48

Ed

It went well. We had lots of traffic the first couple of weeks. Not as much since then, but when I designed the game, I wanted to kind of respect people's time. It does not require a huge investment in your time. You can sit down and play it for five to ten minutes, and while there are a lot of secrets to discover and things that you probably won't encounter your first time through. There are no timers. There's no anything that requires that you come back and play it every day.

0:13:20

Matt

And this goes back a while for you as far as your interest in tech space games. If I'm remembering right, we've talked about how maybe that was sort of the pathway into you becoming interested in tech in the first place, right?

0:13:36

Ed

Yes. My brother in law, originally, I would have probably been 13-14 at the time. When this was back when I was first running the program, my brother in law had made a little text based game on the TSR 80. And when I saw that, I just fell in love with the idea of programming and computers, and that kind of, like, kicked everything off.

0:14:02

Matt

Yeah.

0:14:03

Matt

And you always had sort of in your head, like, oh, I would love to create a text based game. Did you give a shot at building anything prior to Space Awesome?

0:14:13

Ed

Yes. I have built a number of prototype games and just for whatever reason, never completed them. There's nothing else out there on the web of anything that I built. So Space Awesome is the only thing that I've actually released.

0:14:30

Matt

And the great thing is that you were able to do that on company time. Yeah, during our cooldown, and we've talked about our cooldown, but we'll have our six week splits, and then we have two weeks where we maybe get back to fixing things and cleaning up projects. Or sometimes it's self development stuff. If it can be translated to work related stuff and learning. We have a lot of freedom during that cooldown, which is pretty great.

0:15:00

Matt

And that's kind of where that whole project started. Right? Like, you and Travis had been talking, and you knew you needed to learn view, and he's like, well, why don't you build a game? And that'll give you a chance to learn it.

0:15:11

Ed

Yeah, absolutely. He kind of fueled that idea. And I spent most of the most of my cooldowns over the course of a year or so increasing my knowledge about Vue.Js, but also building Space Awesome. It was a great experience for me. Font Awesome got something cool out of it.

0:15:49

Matt

What's the weirdest or crappiest job you've ever had?

0:15:52

Ed

I worked at Blockbuster Video Warehouse for a couple of weeks. That was grueling work, just being on your feet for eight to 10 hours a day. This was while I was going to school, so I was going to school 4 hours a day and then working eight to 10 hours a day. And it was just pulling orders off the shelf and did not enjoy it and didn't last very long.

0:16:21

Matt

The Blockbuster Warehouse. Is that like a distribution center where they have all of their DVDs and VHS tapes or something?

0:16:29

Ed

VHS tapes, DVDs and all their office supplies, paper, anything like that. It was just going and grabbing stuff off of shelves, putting it in a.

0:16:40

Matt

Box, repeating the process on those hard concrete floors. Probably lots of back aches.

0:16:46

Ed

Yes.

0:16:47

Matt

Enjoy it. The good old days of Blockbuster Video. How the world has changed. It's funny thinking about those Friday nights when you go out with your friends and you have to choose a video and everybody's like, standing in the aisles, like looking for something decent and then coming to some sort of consensus. Now we just sit on the couch and go through all of our streaming apps. Trying to new set of problems.

0:17:13

Matt

Yeah, real first world problems there. What kinds of things are you nerding out about outside of work?

0:17:19

Ed

Well, I run a weekly DND game.

0:17:22

Matt

Nice.

0:17:23

Ed

We're going through Tomb of Annihilation right now, which I probably spend way too much time reading stuff about DND and preparing stuff for the game and all that. But it's super fun. That's kind of gotten me into wanting to do some writing specifically kind of in that space, whether that be adventures or other supplements, stuff like that. I've come up with a few ideas for supplements. Just like extra things to help people run games.

0:18:01

Matt

Okay, got you.

0:18:01

Ed

Like a book of traps or designing new monsters, that kind of stuff. I have a lot of ideas started. This is kind of a common theme in my life. I have lots of starts and I don't have anything like refined enough to release, but I think that would be really cool. Throw something up on the DM skilled and see how people receive it.

0:18:27

Matt

When did you start to take an interest in DND?

0:18:31

Ed

Well, I think I can thank my brother in law for that one as well. When he started dating my sister, my older sister, they played DND and kind of introduced me and my other siblings to it. So I played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons back in the late eighties a little bit. And then we didn't have any of the books. So we kind of homebrewed our own game for a while, just like everyone else. We kind of stepped away from it for a while and then, let's see, it's been five or six years ago, actually.

0:19:10

Ed

I talked Travis into playing and I ran a game for him and a couple of other friends and my daughter that's been going on for quite some time now.

0:19:21

Matt

I seem to remember back in the day that D and D and role playing games were like a pretty dorky pastime. Like kind of nerdy kids that are like into comic books and video games and things like that. I remember by the time I was a teenager, it was sort of like not cool to play DND. But I love the fact now that it doesn't seem like there's that stigma there anymore, which is pretty great.

0:19:52

Ed

Yeah, it is super popular. There's a number of reasons for that. Stranger Things. Matt Mercer.

0:20:00

Matt

Right.

0:20:01

Ed

It is very much mainstream now and I love it. I think it's great. I think it is something that I'm glad more people are getting to experience because it is a very creative, imaginative outlet I think can help a lot of people, help them be more creative, help them relieve their stress. I think it's great.

0:20:30

Matt

I mean, obviously it's a community building thing. Like, you're having fun with your friends, you're actually creating something together in real time. And just a simple fact of role playing a different type of person or personality is really kind of interesting.

0:20:49

Matt

Yeah.

0:20:50

Matt

The last game I played at the Snuggle, Mike Wilkerson's character was like this kind of self involved bard type character who was very flamboyant and would come into the room always looking for a date or trying to win somebody over, and he was just really into it. And we'd all laugh every time we would come across a new adventure, meet new characters along the way, and he'd be the first one through the door saying, Hello, I've arrived.

0:21:29

Matt

And it was so funny. My character was sort of the stoic elf and saying, like, okay, yeah, we get it. Please don't ruin the objective of what we're trying to do here by trying to be Mr. Popular. It was just really fun.

0:21:51

Ed

That was a super great game. You guys all did a great job. I really enjoyed it. When you're running a game, people ask me this sometimes is running the game fun? And I'm like it is, but it's kind of different because it's fun when you guys are having fun, when the players are having fun, right. And it's like, I'm just kind of facilitating all of that, trying to create these scenarios and things so that you guys can explore your characters and have a good time and all those kind of things. It doesn't have to be combative.

0:22:34

Ed

I know there's like, back definitely in the 80s, there was a little bit more of the combative DM. No, this is a shared story, a shared experience where I'm providing challenges, but I'm not the enemy, I'm the Arbitrator, just kind of like the puppet master pulling the strings. But I want you guys to succeed as much as you do.

0:23:00

Matt

It was fun talking about how you had mentioned in the 80s, sort of that combative DM kind of thing. And it reminded me of a time, and I was in grade school back when this happened, but I remember I had a character I was really proud of, and I would go and do these campaigns with kids across the street. We put a card table in the front yard and a couple of the kids that were running the games are a little bit older. And it was exactly that kind of thing where, like, a DM would pick on one of the players and trying to destroy their character.

0:23:34

Matt

And I remember being so upset about it and my dad saying, you needed to take a break. You're taking this too seriously. But then to have you comment on that and go like, oh, I guess that was actually a thing back then. It's really fun to rediscover Dungeons and Dragons again in a more positive light, I guess.

0:23:58

Ed

Yeah, the 80s were a crazy time, especially for Dungeons and Dragon.

0:24:04

Matt

Yeah.

0:24:06

Matt

Thanks for listening into podcast. Awesome. A special thank you to Ed Emmanuel for coming on the show. If you like what you've heard, please give us a rating and review and share this episode with your nerd friends. This episode was produced and edited by yours truly, Matt Johnson.

0:24:24

Matt

The Font Awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin, and audio mastering was done by Chris Ends at Lemon Productions.