Font Awesome's 2023 Year in Review

0:00:09 - (Matt): Welcome to podcast awesome, where we chat about icons, design, tech business, and nerdery with members of the Font Awesome team awesome.

0:00:29 - (Matt): Can you guys believe that it's already 2024? It's like we're living in the future or something. Except we don't have flying cars yet. Anywho, in this 2024 inaugural podcast awesome episode, I chat with Jory Raphael and Rob medull to run down everything we built at Font Awesome, including Font Awesome. Sharp. Podcast awesome, the launch of a new YouTube channel, changes in kits, and the creation of a Figma plugin.

0:00:58 - (Matt): We also chat about our partnership with Shoelace and hint at a few things that might be in the hopper.

0:01:05 - (Matt): I see a really cool old relic from the past on your bookshelf to your left there. Tell me about that.

0:01:12 - (Jory): So that's an old Macintosh se. And as I'm remembering this now, we're talking about old computers. This was in our house for a while when I was growing up, so it's followed me around and been in my house and been in my own home office since. I've had a home office. Yeah, it's a nice little bookend. But then it just started getting a little sad because nothing was on it. And as looking over my shoulder, it reminded me of the old Susan care happy Mac icon.

0:01:39 - (Jory): And I happened to have a little vinyl cutter here, and so I printed out the little vinyl pattern and I cut it out and I slapped it on its face.

0:01:46 - (Matt): Very nice. I like it. Rob, do you have any vintage computer gear laying around? That's cool.

0:01:53 - (Rob): No, I don't have any vintage stuff. Most of the stuff I've collected over the years, we've got a bin in the attic, and it's got an old iPhone five. And I, for some reason, have tons of external hard drive stuff.

0:02:06 - (Matt): It's going to be worth something someday.

0:02:07 - (Rob): That's what I'm thinking. I'll hold on to it.

0:02:09 - (Matt): I'm in the market for a two gig hard drive. Rob, I heard that you had something in your attic. Is that.

0:02:15 - (Rob): Yeah, I do, actually. Let me go upstairs.

0:02:19 - (Jory): I recently found an old mp3 player that I think it was like. Was it called, like, is it like a rio? Does that sound right? I had a Rio, diamond Rio or something.

0:02:28 - (Rob): 64 megabyte. When that's what I had.

0:02:31 - (Jory): Yeah. So I found one that I had during in college in the past year or so and was able to actually turn it on and boot it up. And it was such a strange nostalgia trip just because it was still loaded up with all the music I listened to.

0:02:44 - (Matt): Then I had an old ipod that I shoved into the glove box of my car and I would use it occasionally. It's so ridiculous to think, like when those came out, everybody's, you can put your entire music collection on this thing. And it was just like such a sense of pride. I have 5000 songs on this thing, but it would only work if I had it plugged in. If I unplugged it, it just would die. Speaking of which, I keep an eye on this day in technology.

0:03:12 - (Matt): Sometimes we post some of that stuff on our instagram. A few days ago, as of the recording of this podcast in 2007 was the release of the very first iPhone, which was the trip. And here we are a decade plus later and I'm not quite sure if our lives are improved or not as a big promise, man.

0:03:31 - (Jory): In some ways, yes. In some ways, no.

0:03:34 - (Rob): That's true.

0:03:36 - (Matt): Well, enough with all this shenanigans. We wanted to talk a little bit about the past year and all of the great stuff that we shipped. So I thought it'd be fun to get together and talk a little bit about all the stuff maybe folks are maybe not aware of or some of the stuff that's coming their way and some of the features that they can make good use of.

0:03:56 - (Jory): Sure. Can I start, actually? Is that okay if I start?

0:03:59 - (Matt): Yeah, please do.

0:04:00 - (Jory): If you are listening to this very episode right now, one of the things that we launched in 2023 was podcast awesome.

0:04:11 - (Matt): Yes, we did.

0:04:12 - (Jory): What?

0:04:13 - (Matt): Yeah, it's been just shy of a year.

0:04:16 - (Jory): Yeah. Matt, I'm going to turn the tables on you a little bit and ask you how that's been going because this is your brainchild and you have been the primary voice and engine behind it for the year. And why don't you give us a little recap on how that's been?

0:04:31 - (Matt): Yeah.

0:04:32 - (Rob): Oh, gosh.

0:04:33 - (Matt): I was unprepared. I want to say thank you to the Academy. Thank you.

0:04:38 - (Jory): Now, to be clear, I didn't say it has gone well. I just said how. No accolades. Yeah, no accolades.

0:04:45 - (Matt): I thought I was getting an award. Okay. Yeah. So I've been hearing for a while that having a Font Awesome podcast is a fun wish list item. It wasn't an official goal, but it was on a nice to have kind of list and I thought that'd be fun. Travis and somebody else had come up with a basic list of things they might want to cover. Just some basic planning that I had to go a couple of years back in a base camp and take a look at.

0:05:13 - (Matt): So I filled that out a little bit, put together a content plan, and sent it back into the black hole of, hey, what do you think about this? I didn't hear back. I didn't say it was you. I'm not like incriminating anyone.

0:05:30 - (Jory): We're very busy, Matt.

0:05:32 - (Matt): Yeah.

0:05:32 - (Jory): Oh, you sent it to rob. He's remaining very quiet here. Yeah.

0:05:35 - (Rob): I would like for you to keep this in. No, it's not me.

0:05:38 - (Matt): Please help me help you. Help me help you, Rob. To be fair, you maybe even weren't cc'd on that email, so it's okay. But anyway, after a few rounds of that, I thought, darn it, I'm just going to do this thing and we'll see what happens. If it goes poorly, then I'll just ask for forgiveness later.

0:05:57 - (Rob): So that kind of is the fun, awesome way.

0:06:03 - (Matt): I had no idea what I was doing. I had to figure out how to edit and the boss was cool enough to say, get some pro gear. So I ordered some gear so that you can hear my silky smooth voice.

0:06:17 - (Jory): And you can hear my voice.

0:06:21 - (Matt): Yeah, it's been super fun. And I thought we really want to be able to show folks that we're not just robots or AI creating this stuff. It's actually people behind the team and it's a small team. Why don't we give them a little flavor of what things are like at Font Awesomes? Yeah, it's been awesome to have the support. It's been very fun. So clearly podcast awesome was a huge win for the company this year.

0:06:44 - (Matt): But any other wins or fails, maybe that were surprising. What project made you feel like a winner?

0:06:51 - (Jory): Jory, I look at these lists of all the stuff that we accomplished last year. I'm like, oh boy, did we talk about any of this with folks?

0:07:01 - (Matt): We sent some newsletters.

0:07:03 - (Jory): We did. And I don't want to say, I'm sure there are folks listening saying, no, you guys send too much email. And sorry, we try not to. And we try and unsubscribe. Yeah, we try and do them few and far between and make them short and make them interesting. At the very least.

0:07:18 - (Matt): Why not just go through the entire list? Why not?

0:07:21 - (Jory): Okay, you want to go through the entire list?

0:07:22 - (Matt): Three, two.

0:07:36 - (Jory): One. On the list is Font Awesome sharp. And that is entirely new Font Awesome icon family. That has an icon for icon matches with our classic family. Except instead of nice, friendly little rounded corners, things are sharp, baby.

0:07:51 - (Rob): Very sharp.

0:07:53 - (Jory): Yeah. So throughout the year we released a number of those styles we have another. The wrapping things up will be coming out relatively soon, but that was last year. Number two on the list podcast awesome. We already talked about that. Number three on the list here is our YouTube channel, which you also had a hand in, Mr. Johnson, which is full of or slowly filling up with all sorts of fun screencasts on how to use Font Awesome.

0:08:25 - (Jory): And I think, can you also see some of our fun promo videos there for the original Kickstarter, the V six release?

0:08:36 - (Matt): Definitely. Check those out. If you haven't seen those yet, let's see.

0:08:39 - (Jory): This next one on the list is top secret, but I will say that we may have filmed something last year, which is fun. Can I say that much, Rob?

0:08:52 - (Rob): We've already shared with folks that we joined forces with Shoelace with one of the most popular web component libraries on the Internet, and they actually joined us. And so we're developing and taking that to the next level. We want to turn that into something that people are going to love to use. We're going to provide just more of that same kind of awesome that already exists there.

0:09:17 - (Jory): And if Rob mentions, Rob just mentioned shoelace immediately after I talked about filming a video. Maybe they're related, maybe they're not. Time will tell. We'll see. Number four, Rob just said it with Shoelace. Like, we brought shoelace on board and have been working on some awesome improvements, have done some hiring on that side, and are going to have even more to share there soon. Talking about sending emails and communicating with folks. Like, we have an internal tool called email awesome, which we use to send emails to folks. It's an internal tool, so only we use it. And because of that, sometimes there are a few rough edges that we can deal with that might not be present in a product that we were to ship to customers, but because we are customers of this internally, we made some improvements to it. Folks like you, Mr. Johnson, can craft some of our emails and get them into folks'hands.

0:10:13 - (Matt): If I can do it, anybody can do it.

0:10:16 - (Jory): Yeah, exactly. Noah and I had a talk at Figma's config conference this year, which was super fun.

0:10:26 - (Matt): That was a good time.

0:10:27 - (Jory): We were able to talk about our process of using Figma to design awesome. All of Font Awesome icons. Our icons. I don't know. That was a fun process. It was a fun prep process. It was fun to present. It was fun to be at config. It was a really cool process. We're actually, Noah and I are next week, which is not, I'm not sure when this episode is releasing. So that's probably doesn't make any sense, but in January, Noah and I are both actually doing a talk for Figma about how we prepared our talk for Figma.

0:11:00 - (Matt): That's pretty meta, man.

0:11:02 - (Jory): Yeah, it's very meta. We are literally showing, it's about how we used their fig jam product to.

0:11:07 - (Matt): That's great.

0:11:08 - (Jory): We're using Fig Jam to create a talk about how we used fig. It's confusing.

0:11:14 - (Matt): It was a great talk, man. It was a good time. So anybody that's interested, if they didn't see it, you can watch that talk on YouTube. It's on the Figma channel. And Dave and I went out to see that talk and kind of rub elbows with folk. Great time. You guys presented an awesome talk. We did a little wrap up set episode on podcast. Awesome, if you want to check that out.

0:11:35 - (Rob): And we'll leave the notes in the show.

0:11:37 - (Jory): Notes quickly just to note, because if you don't want to listen to that episode, I want to say that there was laughter in the room. It just was not picked up on the mic. We were only micked. The room was not micked. And so Noah and I make a lot of stupid jokes and if you're watching the talk on YouTube, it seems like it is met with complete silence.

0:12:04 - (Matt): But they totally landed, dude.

0:12:06 - (Jory): Totally.

0:12:07 - (Rob): It's much funnier to think that no.

0:12:09 - (Jory): One laughed and we just carried on.

0:12:14 - (Rob): That's right, yeah.

0:12:16 - (Jory): So however you want to view it, either dead silence or that there was laughter that you just can't hear.

0:12:22 - (Rob): So one of our main products we have at fun awesome, we call it kit and it's a way to bundle up fun awesome, make conversion of fun awesome that you can use in one or more projects. For a long time now, we've had icon designers at fun awesome and they continue to make icons just over and over again to where we've got. And we've tried to tell them to stop, but they just won't.

0:12:45 - (Jory): Sorry, not sorry.

0:12:45 - (Rob): They keep making icons. There's thousands of icons. If you use a kit, you don't want to download all of them. So one of the huge features we add last year was kit subsetting. So you go in make kit and you can pick the exact icons that you want to use in your project. That makes your kit smaller, it loads faster over the Internet, takes up less bandwidth, the performance is better, and you can go in and curate just the icons that you want to use.

0:13:16 - (Rob): It was one of those features that we've been wanting to do this for years now. With kits, and we finally got around to it.

0:13:22 - (Matt): Nice.

0:13:22 - (Jory): Another thing related to kits is that you can now download them. Up until now you could download all of Font Awesome, as Rob said, and serve all of awesome, but with more styles and more icons, those files tend to get heavier and heavier. And so now you can set your kit up exactly how you want it. You can set only the styles you want to use if you want to keep it at that higher level, or you can literally subset it to the twelve icons you're using on your site. And then you can download that kit and have a little tiny custom version of Font Awesome that you can serve. If you're self hosting things and you don't want to use our CDN and.

0:14:01 - (Rob): The next one, the list is also still about kits. Last year was a very kit focused year for us to use a kit. Before we released this next feature, you had to use JavaScript to do it. So a little snippet of JavaScript had to be on your page. The page had to load the javascript and do the kind of kit magic. And what we found is a lot of customers that wasn't the ideal situation for them for performance reasons or for the framework that they were using.

0:14:32 - (Rob): Lots of different technical reasons why you wouldn't want to do that with JavaScript. So we actually released a version of kits that you can just load with CSS. So if you don't want to use JavaScript, you don't want the way that works. The CSS one has some performance benefits and has some advantages over using JavaScript. So we listened to our customers and we were excited to get that one out because it really is very performant, and if you pair it with subsetting, it's blazingly fast. So we really proud of that one.

0:15:04 - (Jory): Okay, so this is an internal thing that we did, which is that we did a bunch of work and improvements to our release process, and that's essentially when we create a new version of Font Awesome, when we've added new icons to it, improved some things, added a new style, any one of those things, going from the icon design process to completing those, to getting them into our build system, to packaging them up and getting them available to folks to download to use in our various packages. XyZ was a super long and drawn out process and prone to errors and skipping steps. And I should not be the one talking about this particular step because.

0:15:49 - (Matt): No, because I'm curious how it looks.

0:15:52 - (Rob): Externally, because I'm the one that normally has to do those steps.

0:15:56 - (Jory): Yeah, so Rob would do all those steps, and it took him, he would go dark for a number of days, sometimes upwards of a week if shit hit the fan. And that's no fun for anybody. It made me feel bad asking Rob to release things, because I knew it would be a time suck for him with Rob being the only one who could do the whole process there. If he was working on something else or was out, we couldn't do it. And so we really wanted to make it easier to release icons and faster to release icons and safer. Yeah.

0:16:29 - (Jory): Perhaps most importantly, that little sticky note that you have where you're constantly referencing copy that you're to here, don't press.

0:16:38 - (Matt): This red button, whatever you do.

0:16:41 - (Rob): You joke, but I had that in the steps, in the manual. Steps make sure you don't do this. Yeah, exactly.

0:16:49 - (Jory): Well, because sometimes some mistakes are made. So as recently as the 6.5 release, which included sharp thin, there were also a bunch of new icons and some icon updates. And I made a very stupid mistake with some of our file icons, because we added some new file type icons. So an icon that is a little file icon with some letters next to it. So like file JpeG or file Png. And file Png was a new one.

0:17:19 - (Jory): And when I was designing that icon, I used an old icon as a base, and that was the file PDF icon. And stupidly, I didn't realize that I had not renamed the new icon to file Png, and it retained the file PDF. So when I did the export process, it exported the correct file PDF icon, and then it exported a new file PDF icon on top of the old one. It was named correctly, but the graphic itself did not say PDF jewelry.

0:17:50 - (Jory): If you can imagine a PDF icon, a lot of people use it. It has been in Font Awesome since version four. And one of the beauties of Font Awesome and our kits is that when we release new icons, they're instantly available to you. You don't have to worry about it, you don't have to go in and make code changes if you don't want to. I really biffed, and a bunch of people's websites where they had the little file download icon suddenly became PNG download icon instead of a PDF download.

0:18:21 - (Jory): So that was a mistake that I made. And because we had done all of this work on a release process, Rob was able to turn around fairly quickly, and we were able to get a fix out within a little over a day, which he still had to put in a ton of work to do it. But it was not a week. This wasn't sitting out there forever. And so that makes all the work that we've done worth it.

0:18:45 - (Rob): Yeah, we know we still have a ways to go. Software is never done, but I think I would have probably quit if I had to do that without this automation. Yeah, I think so. I think so. Yeah. And another great feature of kits is when we do bif like that, because I had a similar problem that I introduced in a version back when we do make that mistake, the workaround is you just go to your kit and you just go back a version until we get this fixed and then you can go back and set it back to latest. So it's good to have that mitigation strategy when we mess up, it's just.

0:19:23 - (Matt): A click of the mouse.

0:19:25 - (Rob): Click of the mouse. Yay kids.

0:19:30 - (Jory): Let's see, we made some updates to our icon previews, those little, the individual icon pages and the modals that pop when you are on the icon search. And we actually have some more refinements that are going out right now. So I think those will probably be ready when folks listen to this episode. Just making things a little easier to understand, a little more compact and then actually even packing in some more features like with styling and whatnot for icons, which is fun.

0:20:00 - (Jory): Oh, you can now upload duotone icons to a kit.

0:20:03 - (Matt): Nice.

0:20:04 - (Jory): So that's a pretty big one. That's really cool. You used to only be able to do single color icons, but now you can upload duotone icons and we have some templates and some hopefully at some point soon. I know this is on my to do list. I have a screencast around how to create those icons.

0:20:19 - (Matt): Come on man, I know you can do it.

0:20:22 - (Jory): Yeah, I'll do it. And then the final one here that was launched as of this recording is a figma plugin which you can find in the Figma community and is an easy way to use Font Awesome svgs in your Figma project.

0:20:38 - (Rob): Not only that, but you can create a kit through Font Awesome and upload custom icons. You can subset do all the great things with kits and then you can use that kit in Figma. So if you've got a company logo or you've got your own icons that you've designed and you want to use those, you can leverage kits, work with it in your Figma jams in your Figma files, turn around and deploy it to your website the same day.

0:21:05 - (Matt): It's sweet.

0:21:06 - (Jory): And that's it. That was 2023 at Font Awesome.

0:21:23 - (Matt): Were there any particular wins or fails? What project made you feel like a winner, Rob. But then on the flip side, do we have any oops moments that we can laugh about now?

0:21:34 - (Jory): Yes, we just talked about them. The pdf one. The PDF icon. Oh, my gosh.

0:21:41 - (Rob): We could talk about one of our beloved team members. Couldn't make it to the snuggle last time, though, because of COVID That's a fun story.

0:21:50 - (Jory): I'll say this, we're so often, I don't want to say behind the eight ball, but we often have great ideas for Font. Awesome. And we probably talk about them sometimes before we should or before they are completely ready. Well, yeah. As soon as we have an idea for something, we want to share it with people, especially once we've gotten the approval and we know it's going to happen. It's not vaporware, because we are absolutely working on it and we have the plans and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

0:22:18 - (Jory): So that's a trap we sometimes find ourselves in. This is the complete opposite of it that we have stuff that's done that we can't talk about yet. Now, the biggest fail is we hinted at it, and I don't know if we've talked about it before, Matt, on any of the podcasts, because we're what, this is officially season two. We took a bit of a hiatus after all of the original ones, but as folks who listen along know, twice a year, the full company gets together for what we affectionately call snuggles.

0:22:50 - (Jory): And there's a whole episode about that. So you can go back and get the backstory.

0:22:55 - (Rob): It's not creepy. Trust us.

0:22:57 - (Jory): It's not creepy.

0:22:57 - (Matt): Not creepy.

0:22:59 - (Jory): We typically try and be pretty thoughtful with people taking time away from their families and spending a week with us. And post pandemic, we have been just wary of folks being sick and whatnot. So we test before coming down. We try and follow as many guidelines as we can. And this last time in October, as we were all converging together, Mr. Matt Johnson here, who had the host of this podcast, had been overseas, indeed, flew into the airport, landed, wasn't feeling so well tested.

0:23:38 - (Jory): And while the rest of the team spent the week together, team building, having so much fun, eating such delicious food and really just being our best selves.

0:23:48 - (Matt): Yeah, thanks.

0:23:52 - (Jory): Matt was stuck at a hotel room quarantining with a big old c 19.

0:23:58 - (Matt): That was good times, man. Yeah. To give the full story, I did test beforehand. The way it went is my youngest daughter had a bit of a scratchy throat. We kept her back from school. We tested her several times, testing negative day before I left on the big trip. And mind you, this is about a 24 hours trip because I was in Greece, had a little bit of a scratchy throat. I better test. So I tested. I figured, hey, if I've got something, it's probably just a little cold that my daughter had. No big deal.

0:24:30 - (Matt): Tested negative. Got on the plane the next morning, and by the time I was about halfway through the flight, full on chills and just totally out of my mind. Can't think. But the funny thing is, I still thought that I didn't have it. I was like, I just have a cold. I get there a day early because I wanted to prepare for a little bit of jet lag and get settled in before the snuggle started. And the first full day when I wake up, my wife sends me a text and she's calling me, as soon as you can.

0:25:00 - (Matt): And so obviously she says, I have Covid, you need a test. So there you go. Yeah. Stuck in a hotel room right by the Bentonville airport. There's not much going on near the Bentonville airport, so I had some nice walks in the parking lot.

0:25:17 - (Jory): We felt so bad. Number one, just a bummer for anyone to travel and then be sick and stuck in a hotel room to add to it how far you had traveled and how that you had been. I don't know how much you want to get into it, but had been in Greece for a little while there. Delay to all this stuff, to have you travel so far after having already been isolated. And then I will use this to publicly apologize because on a few occasions, you reached out dming me, being like, hey, you're like, hey, maybe we can do some podcasting while we're here.

0:25:53 - (Jory): And Rob and I typically run these snuggles and the planning and stuff, and it is just overwhelming to juggle all these things. So I wasn't able to really help you out with that stuff. And I think even once you said, please, man, I'm dying here.

0:26:07 - (Matt): I need something to do.

0:26:10 - (Jory): And I was like, I can only.

0:26:13 - (Matt): Binge, like, a series for so long, so it sucks.

0:26:18 - (Jory): There's no other way to say it.

0:26:21 - (Matt): It is what it is, man. What can you do? It was a really crappy experience, but now it is funny. I can laugh about it, but, man, I wish. My main regret is that I didn't test the day that I left on the trip back because I probably would have tested positive and then I would have known.

0:26:40 - (Jory): No point lesson to you folks.

0:26:42 - (Matt): Let that be a lesson. Test early and often. Yeah, it's all good. It is all good. We've touched on a lot of the stuff and a lot of it we unfortunately can't talk about. But what about a glimpse into future work, maybe what might be on the horizon for this year, 2024?

0:27:02 - (Jory): We have a lot of great stuff that we can't talk about. Coming up, one of the things that I'm excited about, and I think I can probably say this, is that the shoelace team has been working independent from the Font Awesome team and that was on purpose so that they can focus on improvements over there and we can keep moving on the Font Awesome things. And we are this year going to try and do some more integrated work together, and that excites me to be a little bit more holistic in our approach to the different things that we support here at Font Awesome.

0:27:34 - (Jory): So that's exciting. Get to work with cool people. Can you talk a little bit about what you have in store for podcast awesome for 2024?

0:27:42 - (Matt): Yeah, so my hope is this initial podcast that we're launching as the very first podcast of the season, if you want to call it season two. We'll see how it goes, but I think I'd like to do some sort of roundups on split work that we do and just give folks overview of what did we just work on and what did we ship, maybe stuff that's coming down the pipe, so we'll try and get those into this season. Last season, I think it was one of the latter episodes, we talked about Patrick Lencione's six types of working genius with Dave, and we're actually going to talk to the team and it's pretty great that the entire team spread across the team. We have all of the six types of working genius is represented with all team members, so we'll talk to different team members about that. We found that to be a pretty helpful tool, personality mapping thing, so that'll be cool.

0:28:39 - (Matt): Also, I think I'd like to do a podcast about the making of the podcast, which is all the things that I learned along the way. I've talked a little bit about that, building the plane in the air and trying to figure it out as I go. But maybe folks that are thinking about starting their own podcast, maybe I can give them a little wisdom on where to start things that I learned and pitfalls to avoid. The behind the icon series. We've done a little bit of this on the blog where we choose kind of odball or funny icons such as Poo Storm, Dumpster fire, the handhorns as in the heavy metal hand sign icon. What are some of the other ones? Troy?

0:29:21 - (Jory): The mullet icon.

0:29:22 - (Matt): The mullet icon. That's a good one.

0:29:24 - (Jory): It's funny you say Pooh Storm. We had recently, I think even in that episode we talked about, we want people to write in how they use that icon. We had a customer recently where we discovered they were using the icon in the most pure form ever, and it was amazing.

0:29:43 - (Matt): It was impressive.

0:29:46 - (Jory): I don't have the company name up here, otherwise I give them a plug. But it was basically a plumbing septic system services and they were using the Pooh storm icon for plumbing emergencies. Perfect, right? Perfect.

0:30:02 - (Matt): Yes. So I will have a short series of funny behind the icon. Why we decided to create the icon and I like to deep dive. If anybody remembers the making of the mullet icon blog, you can check that out. Dave talks a little bit about what it was like to attend MIT. We have a chat about that. Rob is going to give us a rundown of all the benefits of Font Awesome pro. And then there is a who knew all the benefits.

0:30:39 - (Matt): And then we do a podcast where I talk to Dave and Travis about their experience going to Y Combinator, which is just prior to the finalsome five Kickstarter, all the things that they learned. And we're going to launch that just before applications for Y Combinator are due. So folks that maybe are curious about that, that they maybe want to apply to Y Combinator, you're going to definitely want to check that out. And we have something related to farts.

0:31:13 - (Jory): We do. Oh, that's been already been recorded?

0:31:16 - (Matt): Yes.

0:31:16 - (Jory): Okay. Wow. I was like, okay, good. Maybe I'll just Font Awesome reusable tidbits and shapes.

0:31:25 - (Matt): Yes.

0:31:25 - (Jory): Okay, now it's making more sense.

0:31:28 - (Matt): Better known, officially known as the icon wizard, it was initially called awesome, reusable and shapes. Yes, definitely one.

0:31:40 - (Jory): I'm in a sketch comedy troupe and we are rehearsing right now for our next show. And there's one sketch that with the help of our sound technician, I get to fart a number of times on stage and I am so excited. I am like so excited. I've never gotten to fart purposely on stage and it just brings me so much joy just thinking about it.

0:32:03 - (Matt): So how are you going to prep for that, man? Is it going to be like a live performance or are we talking sound effects?

0:32:10 - (Jory): No, we're talking, I would be really.

0:32:12 - (Matt): Impressed if it was live performance.

0:32:16 - (Matt): I don't know about you guys, but 2023 turned out to be really explosive. Sorry, couldn't resist. Anyway, thanks to Rob and Jory for coming on the show. And a special thank you to all you listeners out there who listened to the first year of podcast awesome. We got just shy of 13,000 downloads, and I've been told that building a podcast audience is kind of a long game. So you know what?

0:32:43 - (Matt): I'll take it.

0:32:44 - (Matt): Those numbers aren't too shabby. And thanks for your patience, as I figured out how to host, edit, and produce a podcast last year. And I've got to say that this podcast wouldn't sound that cool if it weren't for Ronnie Martin's musical skill. And he's the one who wrote the theme song. And to put a little frosting on top, Mr. Chris ends from Lemon Productions dialed in our audio mastering.