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

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