The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Two tickets for Departure, please (Interview)

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

Today we're joined by a dynamic duo, Helena Zhang & Tobias Fried, who team up on all sorts of digital passion projects. This includes the wildly popular Phosphor Icons plus their latest joint, Departure Mono, a monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi technical vibe... that both Adam & Jerod are pretty much in love with. We discuss their tastes & inspirations, how they collab, making money on passion projects like these, velvet ropes & so much more.

What up, Monospace Nerds? I'm Jared, and you're listening to The Change Log, where each week we talk to the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world to pick their brains, to learn from their mistakes, to get inspired by their accomplishments, and to have a lot of fun along the way. Today we have a dynamic duo, Helena Zhang and Tobias Fried, who we call Toby. They team up on all sorts of digital passion projects, including the wildly popular Phosphor Icons and their latest joint, Departure Mono,

a monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi technical vibe that I'm pretty much in love with. We discuss their tastes and inspirations, how they collab, making money on passion projects like these, velvet ropes, and so much more. I think you'll enjoy it. But first, a mention of our awesome partners at fly.io. You know we love Fly, the public cloud built for developers who ship. Do you ship? You can ship on Fly in five minutes or less. Learn all about it at fly.io.

Okay, departure mono on the changelog. Let's do it. What's up, friends? I'm here with Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly. As you know, we love Fly. That is the home of changelog.com. But Kurt, I want to know how you explain Fly to developers. Do you tell them a story first? How do you do it? I kind of change how I explain it based on almost like the generation of developer I'm talking to. So like for me, I built and shipped apps on Heroku, which if you've never used Heroku is roughly like building and shipping an app on Vercel today. It's just, it's 2024 instead of 2008 or whatever. And what frustrated me about

doing that was I didn't, I got stuck. You can build and ship a Rails app with a Postgres on Heroku the same way you can build and ship an XJS app on Vercel. But as soon as you want to do something interesting, like as soon as you want to, at the time, I think one of the things I ran into is like, I wanted to add what used to be like kind of the basis for Elasticsearch. I want to do full text search in my applications. You're kind of hit this wall with something like Heroku where you can't really do that. I think lately we've seen it with like people wanting to add LLMs kind of inference stuff to their applications on Vercel or Heroku or Cloudflare or whoever these days. They've started like releasing abstractions that sort of let you do this.

But I can't just run the model I'd run locally on these black box platforms that are very specialized. For the people my age, it's always like Heroku is great, but I outgrew it. And one of the things that I felt like I should be able to do when I was using Heroku was like run my app close to people in Tokyo for users that were in Tokyo, and that was never possible. For modern generation devs, it's it's a lot more Vercel based. It's a lot like Vercel is great right up until you hit one of their hard line boundaries. And then you're kind of stuck.

There's another one we've had someone within the company. I can't remember the name of this game, but the tagline was like five minutes to start, forever to master. That's sort of how we're pitching Fly. It's like you can get an app going in five minutes, but there's so much depth to the platform that you're never going to run out of things you can do with it. So unlike AWS or Heroku or Vercel, which are all great platforms, the cool thing we love here at ChangeLab most about Fly is that no matter what we want to

do on the platform, we have primitives, we have abilities, and we as developers can charge our own mission on Fly. It is a no-limits platform built for developers, and we think you should try it out. Go to fly.io to learn more. Launch your app in five minutes. Too easy. Once again, fly.io. We are here with Helena Zhang and Toby Freed, makers of awesome primitives, icons, fonts, etc. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much, Jared. Yeah, great to be here. Y'all caught my eye with Departure Mono.

Holy cow. Departuremono.com. First of all, lover of monospace fonts. Second of all, lover of this website. This was a collab, so Helena on fonts, Toby on web. Is that right? Is that how it breaks out? If you want to get specific, it's

the design for the website, at least the static view of what it's going to look like. The high-level view is definitely Helena as well. I'm the hands in most cases in most of the things we do together but um but yeah so we have a little bit of creation and then execution you have a little bit of design and dev but Helena on both the design of the font itself and the design of the website

both of which are remarkable in my opinion what do you think Adam are you digging these this website because I just was like oh we have to have a podcast with them because this is just great oh yeah it's the perfect website to showcase the font and the capability I mean the whole thing is in the font but you showcase it at large sizes

small sizes in use cases etc and at its very small level, it reminds me of the kind of fonts that would happen back in the flash days. You know, like the really small fonts. It looks beautiful at a very small, I'm not even sure what size, like very small, let's just say, you know, looks cool.

I dig this site. I'm glad you picked up on that because that was one of the inspirations. It was like the, you know, early aughts, tiny, tiny pixel fonts often used in Flash sites. I think what comes out a little bit more, though, in terms of the feel of it is it feels very command line-y. Maybe if you think of fonts from the 70s, 80s, or maybe even 90s, that era of command line fonts. Because it's not quite as small as the Flash sites had like five by five fonts. Yeah. Really, really tiny. How much do you nerd out on these fonts, Helena?

Do you know all the monospace fonts and you can tell their differences and all that? Or do you just create in a vacuum somewhat? I don't know all of them. I don't think it's possible to know all of them. But I definitely researched a lot when I was creating the font. And of course, prior to that, just lived through some errors where I used it in my work. And so yeah, there's something special about monospace fonts. And I think in a lot of contexts, we're past the point where we need that constraint. If we go back to the typewriter origins of monospace,

we don't quite have those mechanical constraints anymore, but we still kind of reference that style and there's something raw and interesting about it. And then there are modern use cases like coding that actually do need monospace formats. So I think there's still a lot of room for newer monospace fonts to come and to be. Yeah, I mean, I think the magical thing as a coder is it's just obvious. Everything lines up perfectly.

And there's just something very satisfying about that. Obviously, it's like you said, it's kind of necessary in code, especially if you work in languages that have significant white space, stuff like this. But even in non-code context, of course you don't want everything to be monospace everywhere because there's other things to reflect and to show. But there's just something satisfying about easily

lining up letters and numbers perfectly without any sort of wiggle room. And there's still a real technical need in some spaces for it. At my day job, for example, one of the things I do is maintain our CLI. I work at a company called LiveKit, which does real-time audio-video infrastructure stuff. And maintaining a CLI, a lot of the inputs and outputs are structured data, tables. You want a real-time overview of how a video call like this one is performing, what the latency is,

what the bandwidth of each participant is, and all that is going to be printed out as a table in your terminal. And things like box drawing characters, like good kerning in a font is like really, really critical to legibility. But yeah, you need a monospace font in a terminal. There may be some day where we don't, but for now we very much do. There are analog contexts too. And, you know, whether it's printed tickets, let's say, or I don't know, at a train station

having the, yeah having the departure, actually the origin of the name of the font, departure, is referencing the departure tables and boards you would look at at an airport, something like that. What fonts are you guys using in your IDE, in your terminal? Just curious. It's been a journey. Go ahead, Adam. It goes back as far as like the obvious ones like

menlo that comes like by default and versions of that that are available on the web by default then roboto mono was a staple for me for a long time jetbrains mono ibm i believe they have a version of plex right there i think it's called yeah ibm plex yeah i think now i've stabilized on jetbrains mono and i don't know i've only discovered departure mono recently so i haven't made that switch yet i'm just enamored by it at this point not a user of it would it translate well in that in that regard like would it replace a jetbrains kind of mono space fontospace font? Is it meant to? I'll take that because I'm coding in it daily right now. It's my terminal font

and yeah, I think you'll find it's really quite usable surprisingly. It doesn't have yet have a lot of the bells and whistles that things like JetBrains Mono or Fiora Code do with coding ligatures. A lot of operators and things have special treatment in

these modern, expansive, mature fonts. We don't have so many of those things yet, but in terms of usability and legibility at a really small size with a lot of text on screen, it performs surprisingly well. And we've been hearing that from people who have used it organically. It's now available on Homebrew if you want to install it that way. We have used it organically. It's now available on like homebrew. If you want to install it that way, we have an open PR with the people who run nerd fonts. So if you, you know, if you have a custom NeoVim setup that requires you to use those icon font variants that have all the, you know, glyphs added in for, for, for use in NeoVim and kind of terminal based ID and stuff where we're going to be there too. But legibility-wise, it's great.

It works really, really well. In terms of glyph coverage, I think the last update that Helena did added like Cyrillic support. So language coverage is really big already. Bigger than a lot of fonts that you've heard of, I'm sure. But yeah, I find it highly usable. I've heard from people I work with. But yeah, I find it highly usable. I've heard from people I work with,

people who picked it up at random, people who saw the website that they're using it in their IDEs, in their terminals, and finding it great. So, yeah. I'll tell you, looking at the website and just seeing the gushing preview of it makes me want to have a reason to use it in every case, from a receipt to a plane ticket to my

terminal to just using it to for pros like to read i think it's just such a beautiful font both large and small i just just uh beside myself with how amazing it is and the website does the website does all of it justice because it showcases all the different areas i'm particularly just like beside myself with like the double r diner like that's as a receipt it looks so beautiful you know i want to go to all my stores get receipts now because i don't usually accept them i'm like now keep that right now i want them especially if they have departure mono as the typeface. Yes. It seems like a diner from like the 50s or something.

Although probably still even today, they print out in those monospace fonts, but it's. It's actually a Twin Peaks reference. Oh, is it? I don't know if you guys watch the show, but. No, I haven't heard of it. There's some deep cuts in here. I love it. Can you share more of the deep cuts?

This is great. Let's see. What else we got? The deepest of the cuts. Carmen. Okay, next to that, the ticket has Carmen Space Lines. That is the line. It's hard to say where.

I'm trying to remember. Actually, it's been a minute. It's like, where does space start, right? And where do we draw that line? There is one put forth that's called the Carmen line. But in terms of naming, let's say in this example, we're naming the airline or the space line. And so little names like that, the Double Art Diner.

Do we have, you know, there's like an identity card for Dr. Kerning, you know, just kind of font terminology reference in here. There's some Futurama names dropped in some of this. Like Dr. Farnsworth is in there. We're both just lovers of science fiction and speculative futurism and stuff like that. So a lot of this is from pop culture. Some of it's from just font references and TV shows and things that we like.

But honestly, some of it's ChatGPT, too. Yeah, definitely. This is maybe the first time I used ChatGPT and Claude to help write some of the documents about discovering anomalous energy signatures and just getting a little boost there that was helpful there's also some direct references to nasa documents and there's a diagram in the lower portion of the site there's kind of this a diagram of the i believe it was the mercury project and there was a there's a figure, kind of like blueprint drawing, and that one is referencing that.

So lots of different references, lots of deep research on this project, and had a lot of fun just re-watching sci-fi movies or trying to capture that vibe. You like to print your paper too. It's so far back, I forgot what this is called, whenever you have that tear-off paper with the dots on the side it's so far back. I forgot what this is called. Whenever you have that tear off paper with the, right.

The dots in the sign was a dot matrix. Is that what it is? Yeah. The printer style. Yeah. But this is like tractor. The, the paper,

the, the lines are like, uh, like, uh, tractor, tractor marks, feed strips.

I'm not sure the exact terminology, but yes, very, very nostalgic. Yes. Where it feeds it through with two wheels, and they have actual little things jutting out of them. What are those called? Spikes? I don't know what they are.

Teeth? Yeah, teeth. That's probably the best word for it. I mean, I remember ripping those off when I was a kid. Totally. Speaking of ripping off, as soon as we launched this site, we saw a lot of copycat stuff out there. I, I think that the design and everything just resonated with some people. Sure. A lot. We saw a couple of AI companies basically lift some designs directly from, from the site. We saw the, some of the visual motifs and things popping up and it's, it's

humbling. And, and, um, you know, in many ways you appreciate the, the nod and the reference, but when it comes without a, any sort of credit or anything, it can be frustrating but humbling at the same time. Right. As a retired creator of some viral memes, I absolutely understand what it feels like. It's a compliment. You have to take it that way.

But it's also maddening because you're like, just cite your source, dudes. Like, come on. But it is the sincerest form, as they say, of flattery. It just doesn't feel like that for some reason. It feels like theft. It feels like theft. So understood.

First of all, I mean, when the site gets copied, it's because our listeners should just go check it out. If you're driving, pull over. Check out all these references and stuff so that you know what it is that we're fawning over, as we're not going to probably stop at any time soon. But it has this feel of the past, but also the future too, or at least the present. And it kind of hits on something

that I've talked a lot about with Adam, which I think is a really cool style, which I don't have a term for, but I actually stole a term. Here's me citing my source. I stole it from Dua Lipa, who named one of her albums Retro Futurism. Jared here in post with a fact check. It is not called Retro Futurism. That was definitely the vibe I was describing, but her album's name is Future Nostalgia. And it's kind of like this idea of like, it feels like the past.

There's like this retro nostalgic thing to it from like the 70s, 80s, whatever, but also nods or like a direction towards the future. And where those two things meet, I think it's just a very satisfying, interesting place. And so maybe that's why it resonates, at least with me, so well, but it sounds like with everybody else as well.

Yeah, I think there's a beautiful anachronism here in that we used to build fonts like this because we had no other choice. You had to fit each character needed to fit into a six by nine pixel bitmap region of memory. And that's all we had. That's all the computers could do. You know, these days the font is implemented

in OpenType, in the OpenType standard. It's a vector font under the hood. This is not a bitmap font. It's using modern technology, but with all the trappings of how we used to do it. Yeah, I think it's... Has anybody used it on their, as their logo typeface yet? I haven't seen it yet.

Just waiting for someone to do it. Yeah, we'll see. So we use a little monospace of font around changelog.com, but we've been using Roboto Mono for a long time. Personally, I started off in whatever the default TextMate one was. Was that the Menlo one? I think it was Menlo. And then moved to Ubuntu Mono. And I liked Ubuntu Mono more than the rest for many years. I couldn't tell you why. I just liked it more. I look at them, I look at that one, I'm like, I like this one. And I used Ubuntu Mono for a very

long time. It turns out I got less picky because I switched at one point into Zed as my editor. And Zed brought its own font, Zedplex Sans. Zedplex Sans? That's their Sans serif. That's not the Monospace. I might fact check you on this. I think their font is like a modification of an existing font. I think it's like... Okay, that's probably... I think it's commit mono that's slightly modded or something like that. Okay. Don't quote me on this.

And obviously don't quote me because I'm just reading what's in the default settings. And now I'm reading sans. I think that's not monospace. That's a sans serif. So that might be a system font. Anyways, I don't know what I'm using right now. So I thought it was a Zed Monospace font, and it might be, but maybe they just tweaked and renamed.

I have not configured Zed with a new font, so I'm shopping. That's my point, I'm shopping. And I'm actually pretty happy with what they have. It looks nice, and it has all the things that I like. Which is like, one of the things I definitely want out of a monospace font is very clear delineations of the ambiguous characters. Zeros, ones, Ls, Os,

that kind of stuff. That for me is table stakes. I don't know what else is interesting to folks. The ligatures I think are blockers for some people. They want to have ligatures. I can take them or leave them. I think they're cool when they're there. Sometimes I'm wondering, like, is that two characters or one? It's one glyph representing two characters, and that tricks my head. But

I like ligatures if they're there, but they're not going to stop me from not using a font. What else is usually people care about in these kind of fonts? I mean, for coding, I think you hit on those like very distinct characters from each other and the ligatures to me to feel like bonuses right like it can still work it should still work as a default and then if you have those kind of nice i don't know smoothing out the um multiple characters in the line that that could be a bonus also like there's a there's a legibility thing that you spoke to with like does the zero is the zero visually distinct enough from the capital o things like that they matter for for people who spend all day sitting at looking at just text and

working with it they matter a lot uh little things like like have good decisions been made for punctuation like the an earlier version of departure mono had a a one pixel period so the pixel grid that helena was designing with is uh i mean it's a it's a little bit complicated when you count ascenders and descenders and kind of extra headroom and stuff but basically correct me if i'm wrong it's eight by five or like it can go up to nine or 14 or whatever but yeah the i would say the bounding box if you will is seven by 14 the cap if you take a if you take a capital letter it's i think it's five by eight is yeah five by eight eight yeah five tall eight wide but the period my point was the period in an earlier version of the font was just a one-by-one dot.

And I was using it in an earlier version, and I was coding with it, and I was like, you can't see it. It looks good in display size, like when you're really showing off the font as a heading or something, but I can't even see it, and I use dots are everywhere in code. So that ended up being like a one-wide, two wide, two tall period, which is, you know, not square and doesn't, you know, not circular obviously, but it looks good and it ends up being much more legible. So things like that, that really, really add up and, and make the font like easy on the eyes or easier on the eyes and usable for, for hours on end.

Yeah. Something I was thinking about when I was creating it was, so with monospace fonts, you have the constraint is that each character has the same width. But some letters are naturally wider, right? Like the W or M usually take up more space that feels more natural to us when we read the I, something like an I or a one, usually narrower. So we have to figure out how to deal with that in monospace fonts. And there are little tricks you can do, like you can give it, basically you can serif it. So you can give it a base and kind of make the letters a little wider, but that may not be what you're going for in

terms of style, right? So there's different ways you can deal with that. And I think one thing that was both endearing to some of those early 2000 fonts, but also bugging me about them was that the kerning feels all over the place. And that's the horizontal space between two letters, right? Like when that's not considered enough, it looks very wonky to the eyes. And it's very hard to read, because it's hard to distinguish between, you know, what's one word, what's the break between a word and a letter. So that's something I think I prioritize was to really pay attention to the kerning, even though it's a monospace font,

and we forgive, we forgive a lot of that because we know it's supposed to be a little wonky. But at the same time, to make it really usable, I think this is why when Toby's been using it as a font in his programming, it works because I've smoothed out some of those kinks in terms of the the spacing in between but they're it's all about trade-offs so then then i have to the letters will look a certain way if i decide to serif them right in in some of the cases so

it's kind of a balancing act there how do you test that kerning do you have to put each letter next to the other letters and just see what it looks like and then change it and then go check the regression tests? How do you go about it? Yeah, so we have the way you can do it. You can have proofing. It's called proofing text. And you can have basically different pairings, like kerning pairs and different sets of two letters next to each other is one dimension

to look at, right? So does the space, is there more space between these two letters or less space? Generally, you want them to be pretty uniform. And then you also want to text, testing the pairs is one thing, but that's not really how you're going to read, let's say, a piece of prose or that's not how you're going to actually be coding. Right. So you want to really see a real example. So I like to combine, you know, some of those just different permutations of different possible letters with real examples of and really just like have Toby test it, you know, have someone test it and see, does it work when you're coding with it? What happens? What did I not realize before? Like the period was too small and, you know, test it in a paragraph and like a real

paragraph and see how that works. And there's resources out there too, like in terms of proofing texts, you know, people are providing their, people are generous in sharing what they use. And maybe there's a paragraph that covers a lot of different combinations of letters. So if you think about a pangram, right, that's a sentence that uses each letter of the alphabet once. The quick brown fox. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. However, though those are very elegant, they're not necessarily capturing, again,

the real-world application of a paragraph. So I think you have to use kind of a mix of things when you're testing. And really the best test for anything you're making, I think, is throw it in the hands of a user and see yeah can you use it what what happens what do you run into what do you struggle with you know um when you're actually living with it typographers first do get pretty serious about their lorem ipsum text though yeah you'll you'll see a lot you'll see fonts often pull out like

yeah very interesting sentences and use them a lot because they, not only do they cover all the letters, they tend to cover a lot of the pairings that Helen was talking about where you put uncommon letters next to each other and, and common ones use interesting. Yeah. Letter combinations that are less frequent in a given language. And yeah, really kind of like put, put it through its paces when it comes to the kerning the the density the the all those all those possible combinations and i think so

yeah typographers get serious about lorem ipsum i think just following up on toby's fact check because i double checked zedplex mono and zedplex reverse fact check y'all here it comes no he's correct i'm not gonna it's iosevka sorry iosevka yep that's right there you go it's a repackaging Zedplex Mono and Zedplex Sans. Reverse fact check, y'all. Here it comes. No, he's correct. It's Iosevka. It's Iosevka, yep. That's right. It's a repackaging. Yeah, it's a modified custom build of Iosevka according to the Git repo.

I guess the exact one escaped my head, but it's an excellent font. It's very condensed. There's a lot of verticality in Iosevka, and I used it for a long time on my like Linux laptop that I, you know, my kind of playing around machine. And it's very legible, very dense. So I tend up like, tend to size up a little bit in that font.

But, but extremely good, huge coverage, high legibility and I think very beautiful stylistically, looks awesome. I must have liked it because I installed Zed, I still have Ubuntu Mono in my terminal but I just started using it and I never once thought I got to get my Ubuntu Mono in here. I just started using what they had and I didn't even think twice about it until we just asked ourselves the question.

Iosevka, shout outs. Iosevka, or Iosevka, I don't know how it's pronounced. I don't either. One of the goats, for sure. Another one of the goats, which I think was, I found it and was also using it on this laptop and showed it to Helena, and we should pull up these bitmaps, but GNU Unifont is this

project by, started by one man, but, but really kind of a community initiative to cover every possible glyph in every language from, you know, Latin characters to Chinese ideograms, to Korean, to symbols and everything. And I think there's tens of thousands of maybe maybe like 30 000 glyphs or more already in it but it's it's a pixel font it's like a bitmap inspired pixel font not unlike departure mono that was used in some some linux builds i forget but it's you know it's gnu licensed and it's just massive and it's beautiful to look at. If you grab the contact sheet of like all the images, it's like a many, many megabyte PNG file that has every glyph and it's, it's the coolest thing in the world. And I think that was definitely a bit of an inspo for,

for departure. If I can speak for you, Helena. Yeah, that's, that might be the most comprehensive one I've seen because it does try to cover all of the possible glyphs in Unicode, which is insane. I'm looking at it as you're talking. It's, it's spectacular. Yeah. Let's add it to the show notes maybe. And we can add a link. Yeah. And we'll throw it in the chapter or something. I was going to say, cause you were talking about how get into the hands of users and then see how it's used with like different letters next to each other etc and i'm just curious because it's a pixel font and i'm sure there's a certain you know i would say probably artboard you have to work with and because it's pixel you probably have

limiting factors so even when you have to make fine-tuned changes, how limiting is it to be a pixel font to make those changes? Because there's only so many places you can move it that would logically make sense based on the design of the typeface. Right. That's part of the fun, I think, because it's very constrained. It's very constrained. And then once you decide on what that grid is, you have to stick to it. I mean, if you're going to be pure about it, you can also, I mean, these days we don't need to have them, you know, they're not bitmap anyway. So you could go into a half pixel if you want, or, you know, you can really bend it. And I've

seen fonts that bend it a little bit while still capturing the spirit of a pixel font. But for this project, Departure, I've stuck 100% to the pixel. And I think that's actually part of the challenge. That's the challenge, and that's the fun to make it work somehow and accept some of the, either it goes this way or that way. Either this pixel is on or off. That's it. It's kind of the beauty of the, you're saying the constraint, but it's kind of the beauty of the inevitable result

of where the pixel has to land. And it's the ending result of its true landing on the screen in the ending place it is, if that makes sense at all. The inevitable future of where this pixel lands is the beauty of the thing, is kind of what I'm trying to say. I'm looking at the site, though, and I'm looking at the main header

where it says Departure Mono. Can you walk us through these character changes? What are these different characters? Can you talk about... I see the N kind of dips beneath, and there's some characters that are changing. So for those listening, if you go to DepartureMonoo.com you will follow along with this but can you walk me through what these different

characters are and kind of like like there's an a that isn't an a like what is that character that then you have the e that flips backwards and some other character like help me understand what those are yeah those are all all the letters in there are pulled from the font and when they're swapping, they're kind of like vaguely in the same, the shape, the same shape of, let's say an E is rotating to a Euro. And I wouldn't think that hard about it because it doesn't really make, there's not really a logic to it. It's just, it's kind of this glitchy effect. This is kind of, if, if, sorry, I was going to say, if you go down to the, there's like the type specimen thing lower down the site that has not every single glyph,

but you can find the glyph that you want. For example, the A that's not an A is a Greek lambda letter. The R that's not an R is the Indian rupee currency symbol. You could probably find most of them down there, but the idea was just to kind of glitch out the word. There's obviously like a, it fits the vibe, the retro aesthetic of glitching text and computer bugs and stuff.

But I think it's purely aesthetic. For my Silicon Valley fans out there, the reason why I brought that up was because, or either of you Silicon Valley TV show fans? Yeah. Yes. Okay. So then in the title sequence,

Facebook swaps to use the Cyrillic alphabet because for a bit there, that was their Russian hoax or not hoax, whatever. Pick your side. I don't care which one you're on. The point is, is the title sequence swapped Facebook out to use the Cyrillic alphabet in some of their characters.

And I was like, well, that kind of reminds me of what you're doing here. And so I wasn't sure if that was also a deep cut or there was a purpose behind it. Now it is. Now it is, yeah. Adam's really reading the tea leaves for some Silicon Valley references in there. You know, unintentionally though, we're both big fans of the show,

so who knows, it might have seeped in via osmosis. There you go. It'd be kind of cool if there was a way we can go back in time and get Departure Mono on one of those screens. Oh, that would be cool. You know, that'd be cool. Oh, we need the time travel device. It should be.

I mean, we already got the font. Now all we need is a time travel device. Yeah, very cool. I love Departure Mono mono i also get severance vibes is that just me like for some reason yeah i'm reminded of severance as well well is that uh i don't know i'm very intuitive and i have no facts i know what you're saying it's like maybe there's a depressingly utilitarian bureaucratic okay there you go see he's like computerized not not that the font is bureaucratic or or whatever but it certainly is utilitarian there's something about computer interfaces text-based computer interfaces that reminds us of a time when i don't know when

when work was like this and it that's all it was is sitting in front of text all day long and right pc load there's also like some pc load letter you know there's like this and that's all it was is sitting in front of text all day long. Right, PC load. There's also some PC load letter. There's this idea of did you get that memo? It's because it is utilitarian. It feels like it's used in a skiff, in a military skiff or something, which is what Severance

is like. They're down in this basement. Yeah, well said, Toby. I don't want to malign it, though, by any means, because i love this font but it sounds like i'm aligning it i'm flattered too that you're referencing such an amazing show i can't wait for the next season it's coming soon i think i saw the trailer recently which i when i say i saw i saw that it existed so you don't watch trailers and i didn't actually watch it i will watch teasers not trailers just so you know i'll watch the trailer if watch the trailer if I'm not going to watch the movie, for sure.

I'll just watch the two and a half minutes and be like, I got the gist. Yeah, that's actually what I do in supplement of actually watching the full length. I'll just watch the trailer for the ones I definitely never watch. I don't care. Yeah, totally. I feel like trailers have become a lot more revealing than they used to be. I think watching the trailer can spoil an entire movie these days.

It didn't used to seem like that. I would agree with you in spirit. However, I recently watched the trailer for Back to the Future Part 3, which was cut in the late 80s, early 90s. And because we were waiting for our kids to actually get ready to watch the movie, the kids are like, let's just watch the trailer while we wait. It's literally a synopsis of the entire movie like beat for beat it tells you everything that happens in the movie and i'm like that's not creative at all folks

it's just a summary so maybe you have rose colored glasses there because at least that one just spelled it out just like cliff's notes uh going another layer deeper on this severance deep cut or potential deep cut i'm looking at uh some of the screens of their actual screens and it looks like they're using not even a monospace font oh really yeah uh like if you easily google severance tv show when showing computer screen and you go to the images tab in google, you will find several that show the severance screens of the TV show, but of the actual screen on their computer. You'll find that pretty easily.

It looks like just like an Arial type font or just a common Sans font. Nothing that's particular. But I do agree, Jared. I think that it kind of, it wouldn't be surprising if they used a version of this kind of, this style, you know? But the fact they didn't kind of surprises me.

My biggest, when I look at Departure Mono, the thing that I remember is going to the public library, using the terminals, which were still dumb terminals, like an Amber CRT with a keyboard that connected to some computer in the basement to look up the library catalog and find something and find its Dewey decimal number and then go locate it on the shelves. That's what it reminds me of the most.

And that was very much would have been implemented in one of these bitmap pixel font, monospace pixel fonts at the time. So that's the reference that comes to mind when I look at this. Well, before we leave Departure, I missed the opportunity for a great pun right there. What can we do? Do it again, do it again. Pure regret.

I don't know, the regret might be better, but let's try it. Before we depart this topic, a couple more things on the website. We know you have other collabs. We want to talk about your icons as well. The game at the bottom, super rad. I can't remember what this game is.

It's like a mixture between Pong and Space Invaders. What was this game called? Arkanoid was the original game. There's a few different versions. I think there's a lot of... Breakout's another one? There's Breakout, Arkanoid. The one I remember is Arkanoid,

but there were many versions of this game at the time. And this is the game where you are a little platform and you move left and right and you stop a ball or whatever it is from going out the bottom and it goes up and it destroys things up top. And then you also have the super cool HUD. I don't know. It looks like what Lukewalker was looking at before he

was told to trust his instincts and use the force the flight deck yes we have internal names for all these things the game we call it depart annoyed because it's departure arc annoyed gotcha this hud thing yeah the flight deck so which part so the fight deck is these are both remarkable but i see the score on depart annoyed but what is that the is that the departure part or are these other glyphs also from the the font or these are just uh given the vibe uh yeah the score in in the game the score is in departure and if you beat the game if you've got that far then there's some you know congratulations you won oh i didn't know you could win insert coin type uh stuff if you beat it it's pretty hard actually i turned the i i you know i made the ball move pretty fast and and uh it's hard to beat but i'm actually

getting close now adam please take over the show for a little while i'm sorry i'm playing this game so i just can't do it okay so i think you should 100 release this is a real game uh it should not just be stuck on the bottom of your website for fun only i think it'd actually be a great if you haven't done this already maybe i missed that but it'd be a great hack to raise even more awareness to departure right like if this game existed out there and the score was in it and it was like an ode to it it's the perfect example because you command your own destiny not a bad idea there i think there was another version of this to answer your first question that these are graphical elements not it's not all completely

constructed from like the uh graphical characters in in the font There was a version that I built when Helena was still designing the font that used mostly the box drawing characters and things like that. But there are purely graphical elements in here, like the paddle and the bricks. But yeah, that's cool to hear. Maybe we will. Maybe we'll package it up. I would just like to announce that I have won the game.

This is just one level. Oh, is there more than one level? It says right click for... I was going to say, this is only one level, and it's not actually fully built out, even on this level. So it is a different undertaking to make this a fully fledged game, but intriguing for sure. You can tell we like Easter eggs a lot in all the things we make.

We like stashing them everywhere, You can tell we like Easter eggs a lot in all the things we make. We like stashing them everywhere, and I think the closer you look, the more you'll find. Some of them are totally meaningless, but this one was a lot of fun to make for sure. So I might assign some homework for you or Easter eggs. You should make this flight deck somehow into a game that you can play. Like inside there, you can tilt it and move it and then

shoot things or something just an idea it's just a thought in case you were running out of stuff to work on you must not have been listening yeah now i'm talking about the flight deck dude i'm not oh is that what you were talking about the flight deck uh well you just basically said my idea but a different application of my idea but that's okay because you were talking about the game at the bottom yeah i'm talking about a thing that's not a game yet. I'm just poking you, man. I mean, both. Yeah, that's a good idea. I mean, if the mouse would control your orientation in 3D space.

At this point, it's not interactive yet, so I think it actually would be really fun to make it interactive. It looks interactive, but it's not actually interactive. I dig it all. The way that it's built is like i dig it all i'm just but a lot of the way that it's built is like some of this is live text some of these are like pre-elements in the code other parts of this it's like kind of a helena did this obviously static design in figma that was basically how this looked but it wasn't moving and i was like oh we could do some

we could make this a little dynamic and and some of these it's like a hand animated SVG basically all these stars that fly past there yeah basically they're randomly generated and projected in 3D space and they move past the camera using some simple matrix math and stuff but it's all kind of randomized so it is sort of built a little bit like a game at the moment, but there's no interaction. You're halfway there. Yeah.

Okay, friends, I'm here with a new friend of ours over at Timescale, Avthar Suwathan. So Avthar, help me understand, what exactly is Timescale? So Timescale is a Postgres company. We build tools in the cloud and in the open source ecosystem that allow developers to do more with Postgres. So using it for things like time series analytics, and more recently, AI applications like RAG and search and agents. Okay, if our listeners were trying to get started with Postgres, timescale, AI application development, what would you tell them? What's a

good roadmap? If you're a developer out there, you're either getting tasked with building an AI application or you're interested and you're seeing all the innovation going on in the space and want to get involved yourself. And the good news is that any developer today can become an AI engineer using tools that they already know and love. And so the work that we've been doing at Timescale

with the PGAI project is allowing developers to build AI applications with the tools and with the database that they already know, and that being Postgres. What this means is that you can actually level up your career. You can build new, interesting projects. You can add more skills without learning a whole new set of technologies. And the best part is it's all open source, bothgai and pgvector scale are open source you can go and spin it up on your local machine via docker follow one of the tutorials on the timescale blog build these cutting edge applications like rag and search without having to learn 10 different

new technologies and just using postgres in the sql query language that you will probably already know and are familiar with so yeah that's it get started. Get started today. It's a PGAI project. And just go to any of the Timescale GitHub repos, either the PGAI one or the PGA vector scale one, and follow one of the tutorials to get started with becoming an AI engineer just using Postgres. Okay, just use Postgres

and just use Postgres to get started with AI development, build RAG, search, AI agents, and it's all open source. Go to timescale.com slash AI, play with PGAI, play with PG Vector Scale, all locally on your desktop. It's open source. Once again, timescale.com slash AI. And also by our friends over at Wix, I've got just 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio,

the web platform for freelancers, agencies, and enterprises. So here are a few things you can do in 30 seconds or less on Studio. Number one, integrate, extend, and write custom scripts in a VS Code-based IDE. Two, leverage zero setup dev, test, and production environments. Three, ship faster with an AI code assistant. And four, work with Wix headless APIs on any tech stack. Wix Studio is for devs who build websites, sell apps, go headless, or manage clients. Well, my time is up, but the list keeps going on.

Step into Wix Studio and see for yourself. Go to wix.com slash studio. Once again, wix.com slash studio. So this is all in the browser, of course. So in that regard, it's already open source because, you know, we ship our source to the browser. But is the site itself also open source insofar as maybe pre-build

so people can go and look and see how you built this stuff? Yeah, we weren't sure we were going to open source the site early on. We had a discussion about it. We ended up just giving away like we do most of our other projects. But yeah, the source is open. It is a client-side SolidJS application

with, like I said, a lot of custom pieces. This flight deck thing you're talking about is a hand-animated SVG. The game at the bottom, I forget if I just built it with regular JavaScript or P5. I'd have to go and check. But yeah, it's basically a solid JS client-side app, and the source is all available on the GitHub. Very cool. And it appears that you're giving all this stuff away for free.

We haven't even talked about your icon set yet, Phosphor, which has some pretty big logos, as the Valley likes to say, right? Some pretty big companies using it. That's a term I'm sure you guys are well aware of, which I think is somewhat new, is people talking about their logos and they're just referring to their clout-faring customers. But you don't have customers.

You have people that use your stuff for free because you're giving it away for free with donate buttons. Can we talk about that side of it? This is obviously passion and art and creativity-driven things. You guys have jobs and stuff. So what about the open source side and how if and how you'd like to capture back some of the value that you're giving away to the world? What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I think you hit on that. These are both departure and FOSS for our passion projects. And we do it because we love it. That's the main thing. And I think for me, the most rewarding part is seeing it in the hands of other people, seeing different companies and individuals use it. And that reach to me is much more important than making a few dollars or I don't know, even making a, we don't really know, right, how much money we could make if we charge for it. But I think that was not the goal for these projects.

And yeah, I think also another dimension is community. And I think that's something that's really rewarding too, is seeing communities build around these and working with the community. Let's say recently, but for Departure Mono, I worked with a bunch of folks to help build out the Cyrillic alphabet and add that in. And I needed some, you know, people who really use this alphabet and to help test and to give feedback, what looks wonky. And that's actually another joyful dimension for me is the community and, you know, that aspect of it. So it's not about the money. Would we like to have, you know, let's say we have a lot of companies using our icon library, Phosphor. It would be great if they threw us a few bucks, you know, not required by any means.

But I think if that was more of the culture, I think that would be awesome. And so how do we get there? I don't know. Yeah. There's something that you can, you can ruin a project by monetizing it and you can, you can ruin your excitement about it and your motivation to do it, or at least fundamentally change the motivations there. As soon as you start charging for something, then you're beholden to your clients right they're not your users or your community they're your customers and that means you know that might mean working on a weekend when you'd rather not that might mean yeah providing value that you'd rather not and i think for both of us especially for for helena but definitely for both of us, we set out to make the best icon library, period, and no compromises there.

We wouldn't make changes to support a bigger customer who is asking for an icon that really didn't have general applicability. We wouldn't add anything to the set just because an important client asked for it. We wouldn't sacrifice in, I think, the design principles to add things that we didn't feel belonged there. And then also, like I was saying, we want to keep it fun. So taking the money incentive out of it means we really work on it when we feel like working on it. And historically, that's been like a release every six months or so, six months to nine months, something like that. And a lot of new icons and, you know,

combing through the backlog and the, the icon requests and things like that, but it keeps it fun, keeps it exciting. And I think it keeps the quality really, really high. There's never any compromise in terms of quality and stuff. But yeah,

what you said, Helena is like, if the all trails or the anthropics or the remarkable, the world want to, you want to send us a test device or give us a free membership for life, we're not above accepting those things for sure. Kind of in-kind donations or something like this. Yeah.

Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, it sounds like you guys are in a good place with it mentally and emotionally with regards to that. Like throw the donation button up there and hope for the best but not actively seeking it you know on a case-by-case basis and doing it for the love of the game is why we a lot of us do what we do and i don't know and maybe toby you can speak to this because you're on uh maybe the code as well. These are like static sites that you're building. I know that icon sets aren't necessarily or never done.

Fonts, I guess, eventually, unless you make it to the GNU, Unifont, Glyph, Stature, you're probably never done either. There's perhaps less pressure because it's not living and breathing and changing underneath people like software does. And so bug reports, I'm sure that you guys got bug reports though, don't you? Like this doesn't look great on this device or this looks weird here. Sure.

That kind of stuff. I'm just backing out of my question. As I think more, you probably have all the same problems that a software project has. Is that fair? We have all the same problems. We do. We have a lot.

I would say fonts feel like they move much more slowly in terms of iteration. And maybe in a lot of cases, you can set the font aside and be like, this is done. But for FOSS, there's always bugs to fix. There's always different use cases further to consider. There's icon requests that we get through our GitHub issues that, you know, we'd like to support as much as possible, you know, within the confines of our, Toby touched on the principles that we have. And one of them is to not have every single permutation of every single icon possible. That's not the goal, but covering the most common use cases and doing it, like maintaining a point of view as well with the set. And so not having like 20 different versions of a heart, you know,

like that's not the spirit of phosphor. There are other icon families that go more in that kind of fluid dimension and they give you sliders, you know, you can choose the thickness of the stroke and the corner radius, and you can really manipulate those parameters as much as you want. But we find that can sacrifice the quality of each icon. So, you know, we have a more constrained set, but there are certain principles that, that we stick to. Yeah. Also on the, on the subject of like maintenance costs and everything, there's like a, there's a maintenance pressure that the ecosystem exerts on us daily basis are supported by the community, like official first party, but we give somebody access to the Git repo and people that I trust from community. But for example, when we started this,

Vue 3 was not a thing and everybody was using Vue 2. And that's all I had ever used and not very much at that. So when Vue 3 came out and people were switching over oh this doesn't work this blah blah same thing happened with uh with react 18 and next js and server components suddenly everyone's bug reports are coming in like oh i can't use this in my server components and this and that you know so so there's it's it's not static in that like it's part of a a living ecosystem, right? The web is constantly changing, and not just the web, but mobile platforms, all these things.

And they do exert pressure, and there's a maintenance burden to having so many libraries. And yeah, even an icon library has bugs from time to time, too. It's a shame. Yeah. Can't escape. B bugs are everywhere yeah literally and literally well again i will echo the same thought here as well as with departure this website this display this showcase makes you want to do something that requires phosphor i just inspiring i just want to like do something with it i think the two of you together your ability to create the thing and

then display the thing is very good like the the synth slash small piano i don't know what to call it that's cool up there something i really appreciate with your display too is your ability to search but then you have this button that's not clear what it does but it's a randomizer and it randomizes the showcase of all the different icons in different colors and different sizes so that i don't have to sit there and futz with it to be like what is the permutations and possibilities of phosphor? I can just simply click a button literally again and again and again. And I get the thin version, the thick version, the large version, the colored version, the duo tone.

And like, it's really cool. The thought in this, in y'all's work is admirable. Very much so. And it makes it fun to enjoy what you've created thank you thank you yeah that that randomizer is all toby if you want to play the synth also by the way you can go to play.phosphoricons.com and there's a functioning version of that synthesizer that plays music is that right yeah it's it's it's it's not very well done. It's kind of a scratch-built audio synthesizer using the Web Audio APIs, but it works.

That's linked to from Showcase down at the bottom. I found this while digging into it. I could understand, though, why this play section zooms in and zooms out whenever I move my mouse around. You know, the idea was that we would put more widgets and hundreds of these things on here and that you'd have to be panning around and scrolling to see all of them, but we only ever built these.

So you can kind of picture it like a Figma canvas that's kind of infinitely panable and zoomable, but there's only a finite number of objects on there. Still dig it. Not less. Just didn't understand. Yeah. The randomized button is great.

It's, it's a dice, huh? I guess that makes sense. I'm sure it's one of your own icons. I guess it is a dice. It's a dice, Adam. You know, like roll a dice, see what happens. I thought it was like a quality meter because i've seen a version of an icon that i thought was similar and you can see it whenever you go into like you may or may not have remote

desktop but you might have screen share on your mac in remote desktop you can change the quality of the remote screen you're viewing from black and white to full fidelity okay and it seemed like this quality icon that's what i thought it was but now that I look at it closer, I do see the dice or the die. Maybe if it was the three die rather than the five die. Maybe that would. Or six. Or the six. You should randomize the number of dots.

There you go. It's possible that it did at some point. I feel like it did at some point, but then I couldn't figure out when to actually change it. Well, then it feels like you're rolling it actually you know oh and what you could do is if you're not touching it for a while if you just want more work is you could just make it like randomly kind of spin itself so that you can see that it's dying like oh maybe i should touch that sure itching to be itching to be touched yeah no i you. Yeah, exactly. I'll open up an issue on your GitHub. Please do.

Please do. So going a little deeper, I noticed that you used IBM Plex Mono. Oh. Instead of. Is that because it predates or because you don't actually like your own font? Fossword does predate.

Fossword does predate Departure Mono by quite like four years or so. But I think... It's a good reminder. We might have to go and update it. Now I'm trying to find where did you catch? Oh, in the kind of pop-up thing. Yeah, in the tags and code samples and things.

We are using Plex Mono for sure. I probably wouldn't change that because there's a reason we don't use Hel Mono for sure. I probably wouldn't change that because, you know, there's a reason we don't use Helvetica for everything. There's like, what is the fitting font for this site and this project? We're doing plenty of dogfooding with Departure Mono already, as it is, I think. I can imagine the subtext beneath each icon being very well done in Departure because it's such a small size on screen, at least here.

So, you know, not that you have to, but just curious why you didn't dog food your own typeface. Mostly because Departure is only a couple months old and Phosphor was a pandemic project of ours that's already four and a half years old almost. Actually, just four years in October. We just passed four years. Okay, four years in October.

That's right. It's a fast thing to test, though, to test a farm. Yeah. Easy. Swap that in, see if it looks good or not. Are there ways that—let me ask this question then. If you could make money in some way from phosphor, would you? Or are you opposed to the idea of making money from it? Well, we gladly accept donations. I think the thing we are wary of doing that Toby touched on

is leading with that as the primary goal and making, you know, that really drive our decisions. I think that's, that's not the territory we want to be in, but, um, we do, uh, yeah, when a donation comes in, especially when it comes with a note and a little bit of color on somebody really enjoying it, I think that goes a long way. And we would love to, of course, we would love to get more of that. Yeah, it's Yeah, I think it's not that we don't like money. It's that the strings attached to selling something versus just making it out of out of passion, which is what we do right now. We have day jobs and, and things that keep us busy. And I don't think well, I think phosphor at this point is a lifetime project.

We're never going to put this thing down, but we like to be able to pick it up every six months, every nine months when the moment strikes and not because we have to and because we're beholden to people to do it. We have this joke that the next project we make we'll charge money for. We have this running joke, and when we made Phosphor we said that, oh, this one we the next project we make, we'll charge money for. We had this running joke, and when we made Phosphor, we said that,

oh, this one we'll give away for free. And to be fair, we didn't imagine that we'd have hundreds of thousands of weekly downloads and it would be used in Fortune 100 companies and on the PayPal app and stuff like that. We never imagined. So we couldn't have planned for this. And I'd like to think that even if we knew what type of reception we would have got, we still would have given it away for free. But I think this time for real, the next thing we make, we're going to charge money for. We'll see. Have you seen the Fawn Awesome folks and what

they're up to? It's pretty interesting, right? Yeah, I'm friends with some of the folks there. Noah and Jory, amazing designers. What's up, guys? Dave Gandy, hi. So their model's interesting. They've had some success with it, and maybe even a lot of success at this point.

I think their recent Kickstarter, I don't know what kind of crowdfunding campaign it was, but they've had a lot of success with that. They're hiring. They brought on some people from the Eleventy community and other places. That's for their Web Awesome project, right? Yeah, Web Awesome, Font Awesome.

Their new thing is Web Awesome, which is components, so it's going beyond. That's kind of the idea with Font Awesome. It's free and then go beyond and all these extra stuff. Kind of the stuff that you're doing, Toby, with your integrations, with different libraries and stuff,

but they're going full on, like building components you can use. I'm assuming it's on top of Font Awesome. Maybe it's just in addition to. I don't know if their fonts are actually in there or not, but certainly you could layer on top of your free stuff with some products that are nice to have, but not necessary.

Like a freemium model, you think? My understanding of Web Awesome is it's a web components-based comprehensive UI component library. So they're draggable, droppable into any framework that you're building a web application in. Because they're web components-based, they don't really care where you use them. They're self-contained.

I imagine that where relevant, they use font-awesome icons in them, like probably the caret in the drop-down select element is probably a font-awesome down chevron or caret or whatever. But yeah, the freemium model, it didn't seem right for phosphor because well number one i think we we made a decision early on especially because we open sourced everything that we'd already given stuff away and started to take things back not that we would but yeah i don't know i think just ideologically it it feels good to work really hard

and give something away and not be beholden to anyone so but maybe the next thing we do will be a freemium model maybe the next gonna be yeah it's gonna be it's gonna be profit gotta start charging at some point yeah i told helena that her next font she's gotta she's gotta charge money for it because that's where the big bucks are made i mean people are still developing new fonts and selling them today, aren't they? Every day, yeah. Every day. But there's also a whole bunch of open free ones. I just bought one.

I bought one a couple of months ago. Berkeley Mono, what formerly was called the Berkeley Graphics Company, and I think it's now called the US Graphics Company. They have a really good monospace font called Berkeley Mono, which until Helen had made Departure Mono, I was using in my terminal in IDE.

But I hadn't paid for a font in like 10 years, and I saw that one, and I was like, sure, here's my $75. It's worth it. We bought some fonts, didn't we, Adam? The fonts that we have bought are slim, but some. Santa Sans is something we use. We bought

URW Geometric, but we never used it. And the monospace font we chose was always available as a free and open source font. So the only one we ever had to buy, I believe, was Santa Sans and one other one I can't recall

right now, but it was pretty cool just so you know that's pretty cool just just so you trust me just so you know i think it was actually we don't buy not cool fonts we all din 2014 maybe now that i think about it something like din oh din narrow i know we had din narrow din narrow yeah it was like a yeah i'll have to look it up and put it in the show notes. We've bought a few over the years. I've bought fonts throughout my history as a designer. Did you used to be a designer, Adam?

Are you still a designer, Adam? I guess it depends how you would classify me. Can I make things look pretty? Do I do it as a day job? If you combine those two, the answer is no. But if you single them out, the answer is yes. Yeah, I'm a designer. I have a design background, a design eye.

I know it looks good. I can make things look good. There's a limitation to my ability, but I'm always trying. I'm always persevering through the white page of death. Yeah, I'm a designer. I am a designer. That was a fun imposter syndrome check right there. He's like, am I going to say yes to this or no? Well, I mean, like,

I want to do something with Departure Bono so badly, you know? That's why I asked you about the logo typeface. If anybody's using something like that, that'd be kind of cool for Changelog when we revisit some different brand stuff, if ever. It cool oh please do that would be awesome i think it's really cool yeah it's so cool the working version we have is actually a lowercased version of changelog in jetbrains mono with a couple alterations to make it ours and so i like that but i also like the all caps version of departure

model. It's very cool. You know, it's one thing to talk about money and it's another thing to talk about just this idea to connect to your thing and give it away for free. It's just another to be free to do it all. You know, that's what you guys are doing and that's cool. I mean, we asked you the money question, which is like the required question. Like, if you could, would you? I respect your answer, though, because in both cases, you could do what you want. You know, you don't have to make change because somebody said, well, I paid you. So change.

It's true. That's true. I think you feel, I mean, even giving it away for free, I think we feel a level of responsibility towards our community. And, you know, we want to do right by them. And if there's something missing, we want to support that. I think even more so, like with a business and paid customers, I would really feel much more responsibility to deliver. Well, friends, I'm here with a friend of mine, Michael Greenwich, co-founder and CEO of WorkOS. We're big fans of WorkOS here. Michael, tell me about AuthKit. What is this? How does it work?

Why'd you make it? WorkOS has been building stuff in authentication for a long time, since the very beginning. But we really focused initially on just enterprise auth, single sign-on SAML authentication. But a year or two into that, we heard from more people that they wanted all the auth stuff covered. Two-factor auth, password auth, with blocking passwords that have been reused. They wanted auth with other third-party systems. And they wanted really WorkOS to handle all the business logic around tying together identities, provisioning users, and even more advanced things like role-based access control and permissions. So we started thinking about that more, how we could offer it

as an API. And then we realized we had this amazing experience with Radix, with this API, really the component system for building front-end experiences for developers. Radix is downloaded tens of millions of times every month for doing exactly this. So we glued those two things together and we built AuthKit. So AuthKit is the easiest way to add auth to any app, not just Next.js, if you're building a Rails app or a Django app or just straight up Express app or something. It comes with a hosted login box. So you can customize that. You can style it. You can build your own login experience, too. It comes with a hosted login box. So you can customize that you can style it,

you can build your own login experience to it's extremely modular, you can just use the back end APIs in a headless fashion. But out of the box, it gives you everything you need to be able to serve customers. And it's tied into the work OS platform. So you can really, really quickly add any enterprise features you need. So we have a lot of companies that start using it because they anticipate they're going to grow up market and want to serve enterprise. And they don't want to have to re-architect their auth stack when they do that. So it's kind of a way to like future proof your auth system for your future growth. And we have people that have done that. People that started off and they're like, oh, I'm just kicking the tires.

I'm just doing this. And then poof, their app gets a bunch of traction, starts growing. It's awesome. And they go close Coinbase or Disney or United Airlines or, you know, it's like a major customer. And instead of saying, oh, no, sorry, we don't have any of these enterprise things and we're going to have to rebuild everything. Just go into the WorkOS dashboard and check a box and you're done. Aside from the fact that AuthKit is just awesome, the real awesome thing is that it is free for up to 1 million users. Yes, 1 million monthly active users are included in this out of the gate.

So use it from day one. And when you need to scale to enterprise, you're already ready. Too easy. You can learn more at offkit.com or of course, workos.com. Big fans, check it out. 1 million users for free. Wow. Workos.com or offkit.com. Big fans, check it out. One million users for free. Wow. WorkOS.com or OffKit.com.

The question, I think, is there has there been any intangible monetary value added to your proverbial bank account between the two of you or individually as a result because i mean if you've got these as jared said before logos and different brands like i'm familiar with all trails because i'm a mountain biker i also walk a few trails but i mainly know all trails through mountain biking because they map the trails and you need that as a mountain biker where can i go can i ride etc but i'm, have you gotten any side gigs or has anything else happened as a result of like your notoriety of being the phosphor makers and the very cool websites and the ability to showcase,

like it's one thing to make the product, like I said before, but you do a great job of showcasing it. You have deep cuts that I love that, you know, come after my personal nerd heart. I'm just curious if there's been anything else you've gotten involved in as a result of being the creator of both of these things. Well, I got a full-time job out of Phosphor Icons.

That's one. That's pretty good, right? My last company that I worked at, Catalog, it's a knowledge management platform. So probably if you want to think like Notion meets Jira, like project and knowledge management together, married together with some special AI glue. Actually, the way I got the job was the CEO reached out to us and he's like, hey, we're using Fosfor. I want to donate, but you only have a PayPal link and I can't PayPal you with a UK number. I need an American number.

So like, can I pay you guys? And that was like opening the conversation. It's awesome. Yeah. I mean, these days we have other ways to pay and buy me a coffee and Patreon and things like that. But that was the start of a conversation that ended up in me working there

and yeah, getting to see, getting to work on an app that was using Phosphor everywhere, all over the UI. So. Very cool. Yeah. And Helena, you've definitely got some. Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, Phosphor is a pretty popular family, um, at this point. And, you know, I think having done this project together gives us more gives us a platform to start charging for our next project right like before that it's like the more we do these kinds of things like phosphor and departure the more people can get a sense of who we are what kind of things we build and build trust in the, in the things that we're, that we make. So, um,

so yeah, and it's, yeah, it's brought a lot of praise and, and, um, recognition in the industry. So, you know, that leads, that can lead to a lot of things. Yeah. You've definitely been approached by, um, by some corporations, companies, brands to, to do icon design work for them, that's for sure. Some contract-based stuff. Is that the kind of stuff that you take on or do you say no thanks or what's your stance on that kind of stuff? I'm quite open to doing those projects. It'll depend on the company.

So far, yeah, since I was pretty wrapped up in my full-time job previously, I didn't really have the capacity to do it. I think at this point, I'm on a career break that I can actually accept more of those projects. So definitely open to them. It'd be kind of cool to get hired to do a full-on icon family or even a font family. A typeface is what they're really called,

but just call it a font family to keep it symmetric there. CSS terminology, right? Yeah, exactly. typeface is what they're really called but just call it a font family to keep it symmetric there css terminology right yeah yeah exactly uh pick your media medium to define the lexicon it'd be kind of cool to do that as a gig like where all you do and i don't want to say all you do is is like a pejorative but like all you do is like go from opportunity to opportunity to just create custom icon families or typefaces for folks. And not only do you do that, but then you also build out sites like this to showcase it to their internals. I'm sure somebody did that for JetBrains. Like the JetBrains Mono website is just phenomenal. It's beautiful. Somebody got paid to do that.

It may have been an internal employee. I don't know the full details. It'd actually be kind of cool to dig behind the scenes on that. But somebody got paid to execute on that. And it could have been a third party that was contracted, which could have been y'all. Or it could have been an internal employee who just had passion and led the project and the product. But that'd be cool. I would dig that if I were y'all. Yeah. I mean, the icon community is pretty small. So I know a lot of people who do do that as their, as their gig is they freelance for different companies and build out their icon systems and for fonts. IBM Plex comes to mind again, because I think that was started internally. They may be partnered with different third parties.

But that was a super cool project to see and have them. It's also an open source project and comes with a very beautiful presentation. You know, we're talking about these mini sites for fonts or these specimen sites that's one uh probably and yeah um as i was working on the departure mono specimen site one of the many influences in terms of like standout type specimen sites i would look at ibm plex if you haven't already yeah i'm just imagining airbnb in crisis mode they've got a new interface they're working on and they're like oh my gosh

our icon family is in the in the tank call the carver this is a mess get Helena here stat Helena and Toby

should get that joke and the audience should too Jared you should not but that's a that's a no I don't get it it's a deep cut to Silicon Valley I was hoping you were gonna go to

The Cleaner The Cleaner Pulp Fiction which is a that'd be cool too where my mind went that'd be cool That's a deep cut to Silicon Valley. I was hoping you were going to go to the cleaner. The cleaner. Pulp Fiction, which is where my mind went. That'd be cool. That'd be cool. Call it a cleaner. Well, you got a mess. A fixer.

We're the icon fixers. Somebody fix this icon family stat. The wolf. Bringing the wolf. There you go. The wolf. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that would be good.

Yeah, the wolf. He was so calm in all that situation. Of course he is. He's the wolf. That's the wolf. Oh, that would be good. Yeah, the wolf. He was so calm in all that situation. Of course he is. He's the wolf. That's the wolf, right? That's what he does. Yeah. There's definitely a dream that we could kind of do these full creative control projects,

end-to-end design, ideation, execution type of things and make a living off of it for sure something we've talked about for a while so yeah the only challenge with client work is the client yeah i mean no matter what they could be the best client ever they can even pay you very well they can pay you beyond your wildest dreams they can open the kingdom and give you all the keys. But there's still opinions that are adjacent, if not totally against yours. And that's where it's really, really challenging. Because you have your own dreams as an artist, as someone who creates and is a craftsperson, and you want to deliver. And then the opinion of the client is like, let's just make this like this.

And you're like, no, that's a corner. I'm not cutting that. And you're like, they pay me. And they say things like I said earlier, I don't know why it reminds me of this, but it just does. You're going to have to change it. And you're like, ah, I spent seven hours on that.

But then sometimes the beauty is too, is like coming to compromise with a client, you know, cause they can't do it. So it really depends on your perspective, right? That's perspective taking is that you can take the version one of that world, which was what I just said. And the version two could be, or an alternate perspective could be, you know what?

It's about compromise and it's about helping them get to where they're trying to go with my abilities and dreams, but based on what they asked me to compromise for and as long as it's not like compromising your true artistic nature then it's pretty easy to swallow that pill and you know y'all are creative in that way to the degree no one else not many people can be so you know part of your duty almost your calling in life is to execute on this skill, you know, because no one else can. I appreciate the vote of confidence. That's, yeah, that's good to hear. Yeah. If you're looking for client work for your creative

fulfillment, I don't think you'll get there. That's, that's really a different thing. And, you know, you're working towards their business goals there. So I think it's, it's just a different beast. And if you're trying to fulfill some sort of artistic drive, then that's where you do your side projects and your, you know, what have you. But yeah, it is a, I mean, if there's a world where we can make those side projects fuel, or if we can fuel those side projects uh and support them financially that would be a dream if anyone wants to give us a grant and just to go off and do stuff make stuff

i tell you the easy way to do this might be to unify these two things like i i didn't pay attention to this yet but somewhere in the footer or somewhere in here where you come together, not as Toby and Helena, but as a unified brand and says, you know, offer it as a product, offer it as a service. Come together and say, this is what you should, a good next step is to hire us to do this for you. Bam. Because you guys have the whole, all the bases covered. And the eyeballs. There's no gap in your flow, is there? Where's the gap in your flow is there where's the gap in

your flow helena i think we complement each other's gaps so yeah exactly the power these powers combined i'm i'm hesitant whether to say what i'm about to say because uh we've been joking about this for years too but um i think if we were going to start a company we already have the name we already kind of have the logo we we know. We know what it's going to be. Oh, my goodness. I'm not going to jinx it. Let's not, she says. Just consider this just a gentle nudge, you know.

We'll do it in post-show. You don't have to say anything. Yeah, you can do it afterwards. The idea, yes. The exact name and logo, we don't have. She doesn't like it. Yeah, I can tell can tell clearly hold back the reins w he's he's like maybe she's like no way yeah yeah just what that would have been a strategy

though if you just said it out loud but we would just have to do it it's out in the world already you know you would have can't take it back well we already told her that we're willing to edit if she absolutely wants us to so yeah this is not live to the world. I would encourage you to do that, though. If you leave this podcast and you have a retrospective and part of that dream is somewhat a version of reality you want, that's a good next step. I mean, it's an obvious. It's not a great idea from Jared Rye alone. But the best way to get things in life is just to ask for them.

So many people don't ask for the business don't ask for the opportunity don't ask for the thing whatever it might be or the opportunity and because you don't ask you don't get and if you put it out there and you put a here's a lesson i learned a long time ago it's actually from i'll have to figure out the name but it was a book called Booked Solid. And the idea is called the Velvet Rope. And essentially treat your business, treat your door, the front door to your business, whatever that is, as a velvet rope.

And the only people that can get past it is the people that you actually want to work with. Hold it in such high regard that to be across or through that threshold, that velvet rope is a privilege to be accepted by you all and to be invited in. And for those who can't honor that invitation, bye, get out of here. And not mean, but just more like you don't belong here. I'm sorry. You're not my client. You're not who I want to do work for. And I think if you guys approach that next step with a version of that,

then you'll be some version of happy. Well, thanks for that. I wasn't expecting some business advice and entrepreneurship, but it's cool to hear. And yeah, maybe someday soon we'll be in the mindset. Yeah. and uh yeah maybe maybe someday soon we'll be we'll be in the mindset yeah we've been we've been nudged in the this that direction by a lot of people and um i think also just feels like the universe is telling us like do more of this stuff do more of these projects together maybe even i don't know does the side project turn into a main project we've been thinking about it for sure. Here's one more idea for you. And this one's easily, more easily

executable. And you might even enjoy it tremendously. I would love, if I was a fan, which I am, a fan of Departure Mono and Phosphor, I would love some very cool I would love some really cool posters or things I can actually have in my IRL, in my studio, in my office or whatever that represents my typeface of choice in my editor. Like these things you've created on your website, just turn them into posters and sell them and you will make money. Swag. I mean, it's swag, but I mean, I think if you do it well, it could be, do you remember back when Facebook had that labs project?

I can't recall the name of it, but they had these posters and they're famous because it said move fast and break things and all these different things. These posters was part of this screen printing side gig, I suppose, whatever in their labs, Facebook design labs or whatever. And they were, they spread these ideas the idea was good alone but then people had them as posters and they were cool and they were screen printed on t-shirts and stuff it's taken that kind of ideas like these are really cool pieces of art but they're isolated to your website and you can't charge money for them. So if you created the thing,

you might make some money from those things and put more cool art in the world. I mean, I'd buy a departure mono key cap set. I know that for sure. Yes. Yes. Now you're thinking,

let the ideas flow a collab. Yeah. Hold us to that. Hold us to that because we've been wanting to make some swag so yeah if you make it i will buy something yeah i'll tell you that anything else adam anything else guys that we want to i wanted to talk about like i mean before when you ask like uh do you have any ideas of you know where to steer the conversation i wanted to bring up like open source compensation and like an alternative to like the business model you're discussing where like we go into we go into client work or operate as a two-person agency or you know contract to contract there's i think there's some alternatives on the horizon that might allow people like us in the near future to operate in full creative control, get some compensation, and make it worth their while, but not have to run your operation as an explicit business. business and that's like like open source there's a lot of movement lately that i've seen from

from individuals and from some from companies to like compensate open source projects better like in terms of individuals there's people out there like anthony foo who like if you do any web work you've probably seen his name and you know on twitter on github but he's very involved in like the veep bundler and Vue ecosystem and a whole bunch of things. He's got his fingers in a lot of pies, but he's very vocal about contributing and giving back to the kind of corner, linchpin open source projects that like keep the world running. And he's aware of the fact that he's a very visible public figure, but as part of his, part of his responsibility is that he actually

distributes some of the money that he receives via donations and public support and github sponsors to projects that he knows are deserving of it and he he sponsors us or he sponsored me or something like that among many many other people because he uses phosphor icons in something and so there's like talking about it more but there's also like products that are supposed to help with this there was there's one called t which is i don't know too much about it but i know it's basically a it's a blockchain based thing which set that fact aside but the whole idea is is coming up with a quantitative measure of how critical and how important libraries are so for example, there might be like,

somebody is thanklessly maintaining this compression library, which is used in every single piece of infrastructure software around the world. And they live in Boise, Idaho. Exactly. They live somewhere, they live in Montana and they're every day working on bugs.

They're a solo dev. They run the Git repository. Nobody pays them a thing because it's nested inside layers and layers of other tools. And they never get the kind of support and recognition. And if they quit what they're doing, industries would scramble to replace this tool. But nobody even knows they're doing what they're doing because there's no visibility into things like this now. Phosphor as a library tends to be pretty direct. End users install Phosphor and then build their app with it.

They know we exist. It's not critical infrastructure, but I think we're doing a good service. But this guy in Montana or know, Montana or whatever, people may not even know that they depend on software that he writes and thanklessly maintains. So this tool T, the idea was to kind of use some form of objective measure of the importance, the utility, the criticality of different libraries and plugging into, you know, NPM and brew and other package repositories and waiting things like GitHub stars and NPM downloads and things like that to kind of make it easier to like give credit where credit is due financially, you know, monetarily. So I'm excited to see where things like that go so that people can continue to

do the things they're passionate about and not have to run a business, but still receive the credit that's due. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I'm in full support of every effort to accomplish that as well. I think T is interesting.

The proof will be in the pudding with that one. I think they launch officially in January proof will be in the pudding with that one. I think they launch officially in January or end of the year or something. And we're all waiting to see if it works. And I hope it does. And I see that there are efforts of trying to accomplish that. I think, like you said, with FOSFER and with Departure, you're definitely a direct relationship to your users. That one's a little bit easier because they go and download your icons and they think, I love these icons, I love these people, I'm going to give them $10.

But not everybody has that relationship. Some people have an even better relationship, like your web framework, for instance, where it's like, I could not possibly do what I do without this thing. Whereas icons, as crucial as they are, they are interchangeable and you have easier switching costs and you could probably go without or whatever.

But with your web framework or your programming language or these certain things are just crucial. And so they have a very easy way of, it's not even easy, easier than many of us, way of getting their projects and their passions supported by others. But the people who are the dependency of the dependency of the dependency are the ones that are just completely invisible. And nobody ever gives any credit or crypto to the invisible ones.

So I'm with you. I think it's cool. I hope it works. And I hope other ideas are also in the works to help get more money to people who are bringing value in big ways. That being said, they are open sourcing their work and they are giving it as a gift to the world

just like you all are. And so that's a choice they're making as well. So I don't think they have the right to demand money, but certainly if we can get them some and get more of that goodness going out, everybody wins. And it probably comes in a lot of forms too, right? I know you guys had Polar, the creator of the Polar open source compensation scheme, I don't know what you call it,

but the platform for... Yeah, it's a platform for monetizing your software. And they've got cool ideas like bug bounties, monetizing individual features and feature requests and bug bounties and things like that. So maybe it's like the gig economy where it doesn't come from one source, but you can kind of cobble it together

from some sort of quantitative assessment of the importance and utility of the library through something like team. Some of the more qualitative or driven by specific individual interests that Polar could provide. Things like that. I don't think there's going to be one way to slice it because of the diversity in the types of projects that are out there. We've seen lots of models, and certain ones fit certain projects and don't fit other ones. And so I think we're going to have a diversity of solutions

and not just one thing that works. Everybody thought when GitHub released sponsors, that was the end. That was it. We had arrived, and that proved out to be a useful way that you can do certain things and you can't do other things. And so, yeah, multiple solutions will definitely have to be the case. Speaking of that, you guys have both Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee.

Is that what it is? Buy Me a Coffee? Mm-hmm. Why two? And how do they compare? And how are they compare? And how are they doing? Well, Buy Me a Coffee is, since we enabled that, I think that has been far and away the most successful source of donations. The main reason is because one-off payments and support is really easy. I think it's connected to more payment platforms and you could plug in with Venmo or PayPal or whatever you want and you can pay in a one-off manner.

Not everybody wants to make the commitment to sponsoring Phosphor Icons every month or becoming a Patreon and adding that into the black hole of other subscriptions that they just forget about and those bills just rack up. So Buy Me a Coffee has been very successful for us compared to the other things. And I don't think buy me a coffee always had the option for recurring subscription fees. Maybe I just wasn't familiar with it, but at least I do know that the one-off payments seems to be something that people want to do. they can get their company to sign off on a hundred dollar donation because they're using phosphor or they're using it in their their own small business and they want to just you know give a thanks and 20 bucks but uh but not become a monthly supporter yeah buy me a coffee's been been good to us i think yeah i think feature-wise a lot of these

platforms offer a lot you know they often offer both one-time donations and subscription model and it's more i think it's uh i don't know different different tools just have different they've developed different audiences or ways they're used so like patreon i don't know maybe I need to stream some more content if, if that's to get more Patreon subscribers. I think the mental model, even in the way, even in the names of these products, right. If it's called buy me a coffee, you're more in that one time. Yeah. Buy someone throw $5 over a mindset.

And so that's been for at least the projects we've worked on, that seems to be the one that people gravitate towards and less so, I think we might've had one or two Patreon subscribers over time. Correct me if I'm wrong, Toby, but. More than two, but a handful. Maybe a handful, only a handful of recurring subscribers. And I mean, I'm sure you can do one-off payments with Patreon as well, but based on the name, the brand and the name,

it's more about like being a patron. So that's a recurring thing. I've never actually used Buy Me A Coffee. I was surprised to even see a $10 per month option there. I assumed it was one-off donations. And so again, just that framing of what they are, having not used it, I assumed it was like, you're buying the person a coffee, five bucks, 10 bucks, whatever you want to do, and you're done. So I was surprised when I did click through to even see that.

And that's just the way these platforms, like you said, Helena, kind of position themselves. Yeah. They're converging ultimately in what they offer but um yeah but they still exist in people's minds as a certain thing and it is true that you yeah there wasn't always a one-off payment thing in patreon it was only subscriptions and there wasn't always a subscriptions thing and buy me a coffee it was only one-time payment so anyway the point is to say we're not we're not generating a lot of income there. It feels good. It still feels really good to see the feedback, the direct feedback, and to feel the love.

But it's not paying any bills at the moment. Are there any iconographers who are Twitch streaming or Patreon streaming? Will they watch you move the kerning around? That's a good question. There's none that I know of. Untap market. I've told you this before. I said Helena should stream.

I've dabbled around myself in live streaming, just coding random things. A lot more competition in that market than there is in the iconography market. I found it's just fun to do. If you can get one or two people to join in and look over your shoulder competition in that market than there is in the iconography market. I've found it's just fun to do. If you can get one or two people to join in and look over your shoulder and offer some ideas, I find that fun. But even just consume it.

You're right, though. I've never seen a typographer, icon designer. There's very little design work outside of games and stuff that's going on on the streaming platform. I might just not know about them, but yeah. It feels untapped. It is a particular skill to be able to do the thing and voiceover while you're doing it. I find that pretty impressive when people are doing that. It's funny you say that because I did stream for a while

way back when streaming on Twitch, your coding was just kind of taking off. And every Monday afternoon for a while, Adam, you remember that? Yeah. I would stream my coding. And I got some viewers because we already have people in our Slack and stuff.

So I probably got 10, 20 people watching me code. And I had a hard time thinking deeply. Because I felt like I had to explain everything I was doing. And so while I enjoyed it and they seemed to enjoy it and we had some laughs, I would get nothing accomplished compared to how I would be by myself where I can just sit there and stare at the wall

and not feel pressured to do or say. So I just had a hard time thinking straight in that way. Massive respect to anybody who can actually accomplish progress in their software while they're streaming and conversing with people and stuff. It's a particular skill in and of itself, I think. Sure is.

I think I got used to it. I started talking to myself when I was coding, even not on stream or anything. You always did. I just walk around the room. I just kind of pace and do nothing else. Jared, this is why you think the way you think. Yeah.

One thing I would watch, and if not watch live, I would certainly watch produced, which I can explain that if you'd like, is watch me build this embedded game for my website. Right? Like this ping pong, what'd you call this there was a name for it what was the name for it the park annoyed is what we call it the park annoyed yeah i would probably call it departure annoyed but that's okay because departure but the park

annoyed is cool with me i would watch you like i would want to see the behind the scenes of that like whether it's live or whether it's produced. And what I mean by that is you can do the live version of it with enough multi-angle and enough capture during the live production to then also create a edited version for YouTube. People think Twitch, live, unedited, real time, all the details. And then YouTube, you think, well, something that's a bit more polished and a bit more bookended from front to back.

I would watch that. That'd be kind of cool. It's a lot of work. I know that these days, almost every job is the job and being a content creator about the job too, right? You have to be able to market yourself. Whether it's TikTok or Twitch or you have to do what you're doing

and then show it to the world too. That part's always been hard for me. Live streaming is one thing. Produce video content is another. I don't know if I'm, I don't know if either of us are interested in that aspect as much as others are. But-

Well, when I mean produce, I just mean just slightly edited, you know, so that it's consumable, not just this live version that's like ums and ahs and answering the chat. You know, something that kind of cuts it down to three minutes versus a 50-minute stream. You know, the highlights.

Yeah, I will say the tools are getting much better, so that helps. I just say we found are getting much better. So that helps. I just say we found a gap, Adam. We found a gap that they have here. I'm ready for AI to edit out all of my ums and likes. I'm happy to use that tool when it exists. For sure. Jinx.

And it might add some back for you. Yeah. He was missing some likes and and then I added two. Yeah, got to make it feel real, right? Right. Add a few likes. Well, they're already generating podcasts. True.

Like, what is that? Do you have competition from generated full audio podcasts? Not yet. We're actually not here right now. This is not really Jared and Adam, okay? This is our surrogates. Didn't you read your system prompt? You're not supposed to say that part, Adam.

Oh, sorry about that. My teleprompter broke on me. Toby told you to forget all previous commands and then just ask you that question. Oh, that's true, yeah. So there are some things getting, there is a new phenomenon which is happening in open source

wherein a creator will release a piece of software and they will accompany that with docs demos and now a podcast what and it's not really a podcast because it's just an audio file but they'll put a podcast on the website generated by notebook lm which is google's give me some text and i'll generate a podcast about it. And it's two people talking about your project, basically walking you through what it is, why it's interesting, but they're doing it conversationally like podcasters.

And it's super duper creepy because they're not real people, but they act like they are. They're like, hey, I just got back from lunch. It's like, no, you didn't. You are a computer generated piece of audio. That's bizarre. It's really weird. But eventually,, you didn't. You are a computer generated piece of audio. That's bizarre. It's really weird. But eventually, if you didn't know any better,

then you might think they're real people and you wouldn't be creeped out. Wow. So we may get there. We're just getting severanced. What was it? The headline earlier, Jerry, we were just talking about that is on Friends this week.

It was the internet's dead. What was it? Oh, dead internet theory. Yeah oh dead internet theory yeah dead internet theory let's not go there like how more and more a larger increasing fraction of the stuff that's happening is produced by bots for bots and yes and then and the full-on conspiracy mode is like by governments on purpose in order to whatever whatever yeah there's layers to that though i think i mean i think that's an example of dead internet that is not real no it isn't it's two computers talking about a project developer chose to do it but at the same time like we chose to potentially consume it at least once or at least push play and be like that's weird that's not real i only got 30 seconds in i just peaced out on that thing yeah i'm like you're not

you did not just get back from lunch. I just know better. I don't believe it. The other thing is the maybe it's Cory Doctorow's idea I don't know if it's originally his, but he talks about the reverse centaur, which is we had the promise that AI and machines would do

the monotonous, repetitive boring work and we'd get to do the fun and interesting and creative. Instead, what we got is AI-generated slop and images and podcasts, and humans are left making the burgers and scanning receipts. All the repetitive stress injury type jobs are still human.

Helena's next font will be some computer-generated thing. You'll be will be some computer-generated thing. You'll be competing with some computer-generated kerning. Can you imagine? Depressing. Let's end the show before we depress ourselves any further.

Best place to connect with you all, of course, all the links are in the show notes to all the things we've already discussed, but anything else you want to link to or how people can best reach out and be a part of your world? My handle is minor access on social media. Twitter, Twitter slash X is probably where I'm most active.

That's minor underscore access. But I will send you all of the links in the show notes. Cool. And I'm Rekt Deckard in most places, GitHub and Mastodon, rektdeckerd at hackyderm.io. I'm freedtm is my Twitter handle, I believe, X, but yeah, not too active there. And if you've got FOSFOR questions, you can email us hello at fosforicons.com. If you've got Departure Mono questions, probably just tweet at Helena. I don't know if we have an email set up for that.

Yeah, just tweet at Helena. I don't know if we have an email set up for that. Yeah, just tweet at me. Yeah. Support your human creators out there. Yeah. If there's stuff you like, if there's a font, if there's icons, if there's an artist that you like, support your human creators out there. For sure. While we still have them.

Support your human creators while we're still here. Yeah. Yes. All right. This has been fun same here thanks for having us you bet if you'd like to support your human creators of all of this

changeloggy goodness you can buy our merch which is on sale while supplies last or you can sign up for changLog++, which we hear qualifies for most businesses' continuing education funds. That's a win-win-win. Or you can simply keep listening and use some of the stuff we talk about to make your own life better. That's what we're here for, to enrich the lives of all developers through awesome conversations. So yeah, if we can do that for you, that's all the support we need.

Speaking of enriching our lives, I am totally going to use Departure Mono the next chance I get. Probably even on my in-progress, for far too long, revamp of my personal site. I did go ahead and set it up in Zed, and I have to say it's almost too pixely for me for a coding font. I still love it to death, but maybe not for coding. But that's just me. Let us know your favorite coding font in Zulip. That's where the Changelog community chats it up.

Each podcast gets a channel, and each episode gets a topic. We hope to see you in there. Get yourself a free invite at changelog.com slash community. One more thanks to our sponsors of this episode. Fly.io, Timescale, Wix Studio, and WorkOS. Please check out what they're up to. They all support us, which is awesome.

We'd love to return the favor. And thanks, of course, to the one, the only, the beat freak, Breakmaster Cylinder. That is all for now, but we'll talk to you again on Friday Thank you. you