Nerd Show and Tell: Meet Alex Poiry

Apr 4, 2023

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🛡️ Sword Fights, Security & Memes: Meet Alex “Yellow Dart” Poiry

In this wonderfully offbeat episode of Nerd Show and Tell, Matt chats with Alex Poiry, Head of Security at Font Awesome. But don't let the job title fool you — this isn’t just firewalls and protocols.

Alex dives into how a background in history and German led him to a career in tech, how a classic Homestar Runner video gave him the nickname “Yellow Dart,” and how swinging a longsword in VR gave him tennis elbow.

Yep. It's that kind of episode.

🧠 In this episode, we explore:

The role of a Head of Security at a globally used icon toolkit
How analog circuit metaphors help explain digital concepts
Why early 2000s memes still live rent-free in Alex’s brain
Nerdy passions: from Klingon to Tolkien to longsword combat in virtual reality
How storytelling shapes tech, marketing, and public trust

If you love cybersecurity, weird tech journeys, or just want to hear a security lead talk about Klingon, this one’s for you.

⏱️ Episode Timestamps

00:08 – Meet Alex Poiry: Font Awesome’s Head of Security
03:44 – From liberal arts to lock-downs: how Alex got into tech
07:56 – What “security” actually means at Font Awesome
12:30 – Data privacy, metaphors, and teaching tech
18:42 – Klingon, Lord of the Rings, and meme nostalgia
23:26 – Geek Squad war stories & unexpected repairs
27:25 – HEMA swordplay and VR: a nerdery crossover
33:22 – How storytelling influences PR, security, and connection

🔗 Links & Credits

Font Awesome Security Info
Homestar Runner – Yellow Dart
🎵 Theme by Ronnie Martin
🎶 Music segues by Zach Malm
🎛️ Audio mastering by Chris Enns at Lemon Productions

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HIGHLIGHTS

"At what point in time when you get to a certain age, how do you tell if it's you getting old or if some things actually are worse? Because there's a definitive period in American cinema that's not as good as some of the other periods. There's a fantastic storytelling section of American cinema that starts in the 1970s and kind of goes into the it goes into the then you start to hit that era of the blockbuster.

The MCU is great. It's fun, and it's nice to see all this expansive stuff. But I wonder, are we going to look down the line in, like, 30 or 40 years and we're going to be like, these movies were fantastic storytelling, or if it's just going to just kind of be, like, fluffy."

"What is your form like when it comes to historic European martial arts? And then you could do like a super hot thing where you just put a character up in front of it and just like whack him with a sword and he breaks and falls down or he blocks and you can try that stuff. So then you can actually work on your form without getting sword elbow."
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NOTES

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