Podcast Awesome
On Podcast Awesome we talk to members of the Font Awesome team about icons, design, tech, business, and of course, nerdery.
🎙️ Podcast Awesome is your all-access pass into the creative engine behind Font Awesome — the web’s favorite icon toolkit. Join host Matt Johnson and the Font Awesome crew (and friends) for deep dives into icon design, front-end engineering, software development, healthy business culture, and a whole lot of lovingly-rendered nerdery.
From technical explorations of our open-source tooling, chats with web builders, icon designers, and content creators, with the occasional gleeful rants about early internet meme culture, we bring you stories and strategies from the trenches of building modern web software — with a healthy dose of 80s references and tech dad jokes.
🎧 Perfect for:
- Icon design and content-first thinking
- Creative process and collaborative design
- Work-life balance in tech
- Remote team culture and async collaboration
- Internet history, meme archaeology, and other nerd ephemera
🧠 Come for the design wisdom, stay for the deep meme cuts and beautifully crafted icons.
Podcast Awesome
How We Built Web Awesome with 11ty (and Why It’s So Fast)
Build once, run everywhere.
In this full-nerd, front-end-leaning episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt sits down with Zach Leatherman (creator of Eleventy) and Konnor Rogers (Web Awesome developer) to chat about how a static site generator just might be the key to building some of the most powerful, performant documentation on the web.
We dig deep into Eleventy’s evolution, Web Awesome’s hybrid architecture, and how a team of devs found a way to keep docs fast, flexible, and secure — without rewriting everything from scratch or giving up on open source values. Spoiler: they didn’t go full ExpressJS for fun.
Whether you’re a seasoned dev or a newb, this one's packed with insight, edge-case explorations, and some seriously satisfying build-time nerdery.
In this episode, we explore:
⚡️ Why Eleventy’s simplicity still scales
🧠 Making static sites feel dynamic (without a heavy JS framework)
🔐 How Web Awesome handles auth + private docs with minimal friction
🚫 Avoiding vendor lock-in and runtime gotchas
📦 The future of Eleventy in browsers, edge runtimes, and beyond
Pull up your terminal. This one’s for you.
🔗 Links & Credits
- 🎵 Theme by Ronnie Martin
- 🎛️ Audio mastering by Chris Enns (Lemon Productions)
- 🎹 Interstitial music by Zach Malm
- 🎥 Video support by Isaac Chase
- 🔗 Eleventy
- 🔗 Web Awesome
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