0:00:09 - (Matt): Welcome to Podcast awesome where we chat about icons, design, tech, business and nerdery with members of the Font awesome team. I'm your host, Matt Johnson, and in this episode of the Nerd show and Tell, we finally wrangled the inimitable Leah Vrou for a chat about her journey in tech, human computer interaction, and her deep love of usability. We dive into her early days of building things, including fake product ads as a kid, her academic work at MIT, her involvement with W3C's tag, and what led her to join the Font awesome team.

0:00:45 - (Matt): And of course, we get into some deeper and spicy food talk because, you know, priorities. Plus find out which Font awesome icons make her heart single. And spoiler, they involve chaos and fire. Well, Leah Varu, we are delighted to have you on the Nerd show and tell and we've had a few tries. You've been so busy, it's hard to pin you down for these conversations. Welcome to the Nerd show and Tell. I'm glad that we could finally make it happen.

0:01:20 - (Lea): Yeah, I'm glad we could finally make it happen too. I'm excited.

0:01:23 - (Matt): Yeah, it was fun. In the last fon awesome snuggle, we all got together in person. It was great to meet you in person. And I was talking to Jory earlier. We were amazed just watching you get introduced to the team and you were like this force to be reckoned with. And I was like, jory, how does she hold so much information in her brain? It was. It was amazing.

0:01:51 - (Lea): Believe it or not, I actually think that my memory is terrible.

0:01:55 - (Matt): One of the key things to Fawn awesome culture is because we're a remote company, we get together in person for our biannual snuggles. Were you a little creeped out by the idea of the snuggle?

0:02:10 - (Lea): No, not at all. I loved it. I loved every moment of it. My only regret was I wish it could have been longer. Uh, I had such a blast.

0:02:19 - (Matt): They are such a good time. We love it. I would love to know a little bit about your professional journey and how you got into web tech. You were a professor at MIT for a time, is that right?

0:02:31 - (Lea): I was not a professor, although I was teaching as one. Academia is very hierarchical. There is many levels of things. I was teaching as an instructor. I was doing a PhD for a while. And because I came into that having already having an established career, like already being at a different place than most PhD candidates, I was given a lot more responsibility. So most PhD candidates teach as teaching assistants. I ended up teaching as faculty, essentially. And Even designing my own course about usability and web technologies, together with my advisor at the time, David Carter.

0:03:06 - (Matt): So to back up a little bit, as I understand it, you have a particular interest in the intersection of human computer interaction, HCI and democratizing web development. That's a lot. If we kind of go back to what is it that interested you about web tech in the beginning and how do you. How did you get to where you are now?

0:03:27 - (Lea): So, first off, human computer direction is just a fancy term, the fancy academic term for usability, because just academia likes having different words for everything, but essentially it's usability. But not just in the sense of applying usability principles to certain products, but also like the field itself, like a lot of usability research is about advancing what usability is in terms of how I got into tech. It actually started a very, very long time ago. And, you know, many people get into tech because they like solving problems. I think in my case, it was more that I liked building things. I liked making things that make people's lives easier.

0:04:03 - (Lea): And it started even before I used the computer for the first time. When I was a kid, I loved making, like, things that have utility. Like, I see my daughter now and she. She's not like me, so, like, she draws. She makes art that doesn't really need a purpose. Doesn't really. It's like, what does this do? Well, it exists. It's. It looks nice. Whereas for me, it was. I needed to build to make things that would be useful. I had this drive ever since I was a kid, and it was all aspects of the product. I even liked marketing as well. Other kids would draw houses. I would draw, like, booklets with ads for fictional products in them.

0:04:41 - (Lea): And when I first got to use a computer, it was like, oh, my God, I can make things with this that actually look professional and they don't depend on the dexterity of my hands. And I can make things that are so much more useful. And especially when I got into programming, which it wasn't through code in the beginning, was through this visual thing because the code seemed too scary when I was like, 11.

0:05:04 - (Lea): But there was this visual ID. It was called Multimedia Fusion. I don't even. Probably doesn't exist anymore. And it was promising that it would let you make your own screensavers and games without any programming. I convinced my parents to buy it for me. Of course, I did not make games or screensavers. I ended up making, like, a graphics app and things like that. And eventually after like a year of using that, like any Hour in the day that I could spend on that, I would spend it on that. It was like a complete hyper focus.

0:05:31 - (Lea): And then after a year I wanted to learn programming because I had hit the ceiling. Like all of these visual tools usually have a ceiling that can't get beyond a certain point without actual programming of some kind. So I was ready to learn code at the time. I was finally ready to learn an actual programming language. And I've had a few false starts there as well. Like I, I had heard that C was what hardcore programmers used. So I tried to start from that and it didn't make any sense whatsoever because C is a terrible language for your first one.

0:06:01 - (Lea): So then I tried Visual Basic 6 and then that actually worked. And for many years that was all I used. And I loved it. I would make things, but I would come back from school and I would basically spend almost all of my day coding. And what was not great about this process was that back then to get people to use what you made. I mean, not that I had any channel, any idea of how I would get users. It was more like I had this deeply held belief, which I have no idea where it came from, but I had this deeply held belief that if I build something great, somehow magically new users will appear.

0:06:36 - (Lea): And now I know that this is not true. But like I was a kid back then and that's what kept me going. Like the idea that I could make something that helps people do things in a better way. And when I discovered web development way later, like I was 19 or so, and the idea that I could make something and have it in people's hands and having people using it in seconds, minutes, like immediately. There was no process of downloading and installing and nothing. It was just they visit a URL and that's blew my mind.

0:07:07 - (Lea): I never wrote a single line of Visual Basic again. And I started freelancing back then, but I, at this point, I mean, it's been like almost 20 years. So I've done a lot of different things, research, web standards work. I have this tendency that if I'm using something and I always noticed the usability of things, I always noticed when something was a pain to use and I had this deep need to improve it, to fix the problem and to fix the problem in the right place, I didn't want to work around it, I wanted to fix it at the root cause. And sometimes the root cause was the web technologies themselves.

0:07:41 - (Lea): So I ended up trying to improve them as well. And people liked my ideas and got invited to participate in the CSS working group and eventually in the tag, which sort of oversees proposals across the whole web platform.

0:07:52 - (Matt): Is that W3C and sort of like shaping web tech? Can you tell me a little bit about being a part of that, about that project and your involvement in that?

0:08:01 - (Lea): So W3C is one of the consortiums that define the web technologies that people use to develop websites and web applications. W3C also has this special working group called the TAG, the Technical Architecture Group, which is mostly an elected body. It's elected by the organizations that are W3C members, which include big companies like Google and Apple, or browser vendors like Mozilla, big websites like Facebook and things like that, or even research institutions and organizations like hundreds of W3C members, and they elect people into the tag. So I was elected in the TAG for the first time in 2020 after my friend Elica from the CSS working group was like, have you considered running for the tag? And I'm like, you must be out of your mind.

0:08:49 - (Lea): Me in the tag? No. And eventually, somehow she convinced me and I ended up getting elected. And I loved it. It was some of the. Probably some of the most meaningful work I've done. There's a bunch of features in CSS today that people use that I have proposed, but that CSS is just one part of the web platform, whereas participating in the TAG is sort of a. The TAG is like a bird's eye view. It doesn't design technologies.

0:09:13 - (Lea): It reviews the technologies that others have designed across all technologies of the web platform, including technologies that are defined outside W3C, like HTML or JavaScript. It's kind of like a design review across all aspects. And some of them are very early, like in the idea stage. Others are very late for things that are just about to ship. And we distill the experience from these design reviews into principles documents. There's a design principles document that includes design principles across all web platform technologies, which I became particularly interested in. I ended up being editor of that.

0:09:47 - (Matt): Wow.

0:09:48 - (Lea): Because that's the way to make design reviews scale. Like, if you. If you have to depend on people having the expertise to do the review, it doesn't really scale. And also we suggest that people read the design principles document before the requested reviews so that if they catch some of the issues themselves early on, then we can focus on any remaining issues.

0:10:07 - (Matt): Wow, that is so great to be involved at, like, such a high level. I mean, that just sounds like a dream, you know, like the way that you're explaining your early interest in solving problems and then getting into tech and to be involved in an organization that oversees all that, that's. That's amazing.

0:10:25 - (Lea): So I ended up not standing for reelection. So my term in the tag actually, actually ends this January, which was a very difficult decision to make. I decided that the seat was better filled by someone with more time. Like, I did not have the time anymore to do this work in the way I thought it should be done, even though it was a very hard decision. But one of the projects I was excited about, and I really hope someone picks it up after I leave the tag. We have this design principles document that targets specification writers that is meant for people writing technologies for the web platform to read and like, see what to avoid and like.

0:10:59 - (Lea): It provides guidance for them. But APIs are not designed only by specification writers. Right. They're also designed by developers. I mean, developers have been writing JavaScript APIs since the beginning now with custom properties and even mixins and things like that. They're also designing CSS APIs with custom elements. They are designing HTML APIs. So there is not much guidance for these things right now. And when you look at, for example, the people designing HTML elements for the web platform, like wouldn't design them that way. And we have this guidance for them. And I was thinking a lot of this guidance would actually apply to web developers as well. Like it would be useful to web developers. It's not specific to specs. So I wanted to make a subset of that document or like a version of that document for developers in the same way that a while ago, I don't know if you remember, there was an effort to make the HTML spec available for developers, like to have a separate version for developers. And I think that ended up being very useful.

0:11:58 - (Lea): And there isn't that much design principles guidance when it comes to designing these kinds of APIs for JavaScript. It can borrow a lot of design principles from existing software engineering because there is work on design principles for these kinds of APIs. But when it comes to designing HTML and CSS APIs, there is nothing, Nothing. So I thought that would be very useful outside of the tag. One of the things I'm very excited about is the inline if function that I proposed in June and it got accepted on my birthday. Actually, it was the best birthday gift ever.

0:12:30 - (Matt): Yeah, congratulations.

0:12:31 - (Lea): It's an important component for being able to design custom properties that do a lot more than they can do today. Because right now that you can just use their values and properties verbatim. And if that not good enough, well, whereas if you actually have conditionals, like there's so many more things that you can do, which is very important for web components as well, which is a big interest of mine, because they expose a CSS API as well. They expose certain custom properties to do things, and that way they could expose higher level custom properties.

0:13:02 - (Lea): I'm also trying to figure out how to solve 30 problems with design systems in CSS. I think the ergonomics of working with design tokens in CSS today could be improved quite a lot. And there have been a bunch of proposals around this. I'm still not sure what's the best direction. Do we introduce a list primitive to css? Do we introduce an object primitive, a group primitive so you can pass a bunch of colors around, a bunch of tokens around, ideally an entire design system, rather than having to set a ton of CSS properties and then how do you get the next lightest color? And then. And things like that. Like right now you can't do any of that. Everything needs to be done manually.

0:13:52 - (Matt): So at some point you got on Dave and Travis's radar and I imagine there were some conversations being had. Then eventually you come on the Font awesome team. Can you tell me a little bit about how that conversation started? What was Dave reaching out about? And then how did that relationship develop to where they thought, oh, there might be a partnership here?

0:14:15 - (Lea): So originally Dave reached out in December last year, I think about something related to Color GS, which is one of my open source projects. It's a library for handling color spaces, color manipulation. I started it together with Chris Lilly, who is also. Both of us are co editors of the CSS colors specifications. And we wanted a JavaScript API to help us work with colors, with CSS colors and also to prototype ideas and play around with them, to eventually define a color object for the web platform as well.

0:14:49 - (Lea): And it has become fairly successful, I think at this point. It's my second most popular open source project after Prism. It has like over 10 million downloads at this point. Apparently it was used for something in web awesome and they've reached out to ask me about it and we ended up having a call at some point and I realized that we had a lot in common in terms of the way we think about products, about usability, about design.

0:15:18 - (Lea): So we had some very interesting conversations, some very long conversations. There was no formal interview at any point, but we just had a lot of like very long conversations. There was even a conversation that lasted four hours at some point that sounds like Dave. Oh, and like Leah. So like Two people like that together.

0:15:37 - (Matt): And you're solving all the world's problems.

0:15:40 - (Lea): And eventually, like I, I met Travis way later. Like, I met Travis shortly before I was hired. Like, at some point it dawned to both of us, I think, that this was a very good fit. Like, I was interested in practically everything that for awesome was doing. I was very interested in web components. I had been involved in web components from the web standards point of view, but also I had built web components of my own.

0:16:05 - (Lea): I was very interested. I had used Shoelace, which is what became Web Awesome. And I was also very interested in SVG in icon fonts. I think there's even a possibility I may have done the first icon font used on the web. I don't know. I cannot find any recorded usages of icon fonts on the web before this blog post that I did like a very long time ago, which was actually to design an iPhone keyboard. And I used an icon font with just that I needed for that. And it was not a thing at the time. It's just how would I do these icons?

0:16:40 - (Lea): I want them to adapt to the color easily. Well, I guess I'm going to use a. I'm going to make a custom font. I didn't even realize it was a technique at the time, was solving problems. And at the time, Eleventy had not joined Font awesome yet. But when I found out about that, I was also extremely excited because I've been using Eleventy on everything. Even my PhD thesis was done with Eleventy, which is probably one of the most complex Eleventy projects out there. Like it is.

0:17:06 - (Matt): Oh, that's great.

0:17:07 - (Lea): I ended up creating like a bunch of Eleventy plugins for that as well, which I want to properly release at some point. I mean, they're public, but I haven't like taken the time to polish them and do a proper launch.

0:17:19 - (Matt): Wow. All the stars aligned on that one. Geez, that is so great. Were you aware and using Font awesome prior to connecting with Dave?

0:17:27 - (Lea): I wasn't. Only because I hadn't fully understood its licensing model. I was under the impression that you have to buy a license and continue paying for the license, otherwise you have to remove it from all the websites you've used Font awesome on, which is not actually the case, but I didn't know that until basically I started talking with Dave. And also I thought that I couldn't use it on open source projects. And like a lot of my work is open source.

0:17:49 - (Lea): I'm an open book as a person. I love transparency. And for my work as well, my default state is if there's no reason for this to be private, it should be public. Whereas I think a lot of people operate on the opposite philosophy. Like, if there's no reason for this to be public, it should be private.

0:18:08 - (Matt): You've been on the team for a couple months now, and what are you dipping your toes into? What are you working on right now? Is there anything that you can talk about?

0:18:17 - (Lea): So, technically, even my role is product. Like, my title is product Lead. And as Dave puts it, my job is to make sure that nothing with poor usability gets released. But actually because it's also because it's a small company, and that's the reason I wanted to work at a small company as well, is that I get to work on a big variety of things and wear a bunch of different hats. I don't only do product work. I've done development work. I've even done some design work.

0:18:43 - (Lea): Anything that, you know, needs doing at any given time and I. And I can help with. And I'm interested in, like, sure, why not? But obviously my biggest interest is the parts that connect to API. Design usability, like, being able to identify problems, design better solutions. I've done a bunch of that. These days, I'm focusing on Web. Awesome. Since we're doing these weekly backend releases, like for Kickstarter backers, we're doing a release almost every week at this point, like with new things every week.

0:19:15 - (Lea): So there's a lot of activity on that project. And it's also a project I'm really interested in. But especially when I first joined, I did a lot of work on identifying usability issues with font. Awesome. How could we solve these? And sometimes there were actually tough engineering challenges with these as well. And I love that I can do both things that, like, you know, a lot of product people don't have a deep technical understanding. So if the engineer is like, oh, this is hard to do, it just stops there. It's like, okay, I guess it's hard to do.

0:19:47 - (Lea): Whereas because I can do both things, it's like, okay, what is the technical challenge? How could we work around the technical challenge? Is there a better solution? But, like, I don't like solving problems for the sake of solving problems, but I really enjoy solving problems. If it. It results in utility, if it results in something, if it results in making a better product, in satisfying user needs better and making things easier for people, like in reducing friction.

0:20:11 - (Matt): Yeah, that. That really goes along the lines of what Dave already, what he always talks about. And in regards to human centric design, you know, and we've talked about how really bright folks in the tech field sometimes can get a little bit enamored with the tools and the actual problem solving because they're, that's how their brain works. But they may not necessarily be geared towards what's the end result. Like how is this actually going to help a human being on the other end of this. And I think that there's a lot of folks on the team that that's their mindset, like Dave and like you. That's probably, I would imagine, one of the reasons why you guys could have a four hour conversation, right, because you're talking about how is this actually going to help somebody. That's a great skill to have.

0:20:55 - (Lea): Yeah, exactly. I love that this is prioritized at Font. Awesome. It was one of the reasons I joined. I love that it has a very user centric philosophy and I. And this is something that needs to be prioritized from the top, right. It does not work to think about usability as an afterthought because usability doesn't always come easy. Sometimes it requires prioritizing it a lot of the time. Going with a better option for users means it is a lot harder to implement.

0:21:21 - (Lea): There is a lot of that kind of trade off without usability being prioritized at the organizational level it is very easy to just say, okay, let's just do it in the easiest way. And that's how you end up with API debt. Which is a term that Corey coined the other day and I loved it. I think if it's not already a term, I think it should totally be a term. Also, what you said about engineers often being too deeply into the implementation and not thinking about the user. So here's a fun thing. I mentioned earlier that at MIT I co designed this usability and Web technologies course which its purpose was to basically lure MIT students in with web technologies and teach them usability in the process. Because usability has this problem that if you don't know usability, you don't know you need to learn it.

0:22:10 - (Lea): So it is one of those things that many people do not seek out to learn because it's an unknown unknown. So we had a lot of people after our first lecture come to us and say, wow, I've never thought about this before. I never thought of this, of things from the user's perspective before. Never crossed their mind. And we're talking about CS majors that were about to graduate. In many cases, especially when the class first started, it was like a junior or senior course. And eventually over the years we tried to reduce the prerequisites and make it, and make it a course that a sophomore could, could select.

0:22:49 - (Lea): But like we've had a lot of people that were about to graduate CS and had never thought about the user of what they were making. And I think that is a failure in CS curriculums. It is not a failure specific at a specific usability. It's like again, if ACI is not prioritized, it, it will just be skipped. And in most universities it's not prioritized because again, like the people designing the curriculum also do not know it's important. It's an unknown unknown.

0:23:19 - (Lea): So there's a certain like chicken and egg problem here. So I think it's important to prioritize it at the organizational level so that engineers who have not thought that way from, you know, their training can start getting into this mindset. I've also found it really helpful to have engineers observe usability testing. There were certain cases in my career where there have been a, there has been a debate between exactly the trade off I mentioned, like the usable option and the easy to implement option. This comes up very frequently.

0:23:50 - (Lea): And the lead engineer wanted to implement the easy to implement option and was unconvinced about the usable option. And then like after sitting through some usability testing sessions, it became obvious to everyone what needed to be done. So I think that is, that is, that's a great way to start building that kind of sense.

0:24:06 - (Matt): In Dave's experience at mit, he would sort of reflect on and not to disparage like bright, talented people. Sometimes folks in tech, they're so enamored by the technology and the problem solving and the math and everything behind it. They don't see the people aspect of it and you know, people are built differently. That's fine. You know, you would hope that someone's in that mindset that they would be brought onto a team where there's a good balance, you know, so that they can see their own blind spots. But one of the things that I really love when I hear Dave kind of distill these big ideas is he says we're nerds that like people.

0:24:48 - (Lea): Yeah, I love that.

0:24:49 - (Matt): Which goes back to that idea of usability and that it's really about the customer. It's people centered design. I just feel like that entire philosophy is just baked into how Font awesome does things. And it's just really neat to see it in motion.

0:25:08 - (Lea): Yeah, I love that because there are so many companies where you have to push water uphill because they don't have that kind of culture.

0:25:17 - (Matt): Yep, we are very fortunate that way for sure. Leah, do you have particular and you know this. We like to celebrate our nerd and talk about the interest we might have outside of work that kind of energize us to gives us energy for the work that we do here. Is there it could be tech related, it could be non tech related. Is there anything that you like to fill your time with outside of your font? Awesome work.

0:25:52 - (Lea): Like I said, my, my. The thing I enjoy the most is building things for people. Building tools for people. So probably my biggest interest outside of work is still building things. It's just building things like building open source projects. I actually counted over 50 at some point. Not all of them are released. Like a lot of them. It's hard to prioritize and find time for them. So a lot of them are not released. I think I've released something like over 30.

0:26:17 - (Lea): Obviously some of them are very small and some of them have become fairly popular. Like Prism JS is used all over the web, has over a billion downloads. Color JS has become quite popular and there are some one off things. Like there was this, this autocomplete plugin I wrote a while ago called awesome Pleat that for some reason got like something like 6000 GitHub stars in like a week or something. I have no idea how. And I mean it was featured in GitHub's newsletter that probably explains it, but still it was like seriously an autocomplete widget.

0:26:52 - (Lea): Like sometimes things surprise you. Sometimes you put a lot of effort into an open source project and then it launches and it's like people don't get it or it doesn't really succeed very much. And other times you make something in a weekend and it gets thousands or millions of users and it's like really.

0:27:12 - (Matt): You never know what's going to hit.

0:27:14 - (Lea): Yeah, I mean my work at MIT for example. One of the reasons I decided to do a PhD was was impact was to make things that make people's lives easier in some way. And I thought that doing a PhD, especially at a university like MIT would give me the space to make that kind of impact. And actually probably my most impactful work has been outside mit. I did release my work there as an open source project. It was called Mavo. It was basically like an HTML based language for developing web applications.

0:27:49 - (Lea): And there was also a bunch of other things, but for something so abstract as that, like people do not go looking, how can I Make web applications with HTML. It's not something that people search for. And also research has its own demands and they're very hard to reconcile with the demands of actually making something that is used by people. Which is also why I decided to leave academia. It's like I said, for me the most important thing is to make.

0:28:17 - (Lea): To make things with utility, to make things that people actually use. I love research, but I'm not interested in like spending my life making only research prototypes. I love that phase. But for me it has to be like a stage, like the R and D stage. Whereas, like if you're in academia, if you're in research, that is your entire work. You stop at the end of it. Like then you go to the next project, then you do research again, but you never actually shift.

0:28:41 - (Lea): And I wanted to ship.

0:28:43 - (Matt): Yeah, I think you're in the great, you're in a good place now then. It's really great to hear you reflect on kind of your journey. And it seems like Font awesome is an awesome place to land.

0:28:58 - (Lea): I love it. I love my job and I love the people as well. Like everybody is really nice. I love the culture. Like there's this culture of like not taking things too seriously with not being too corporate. I mean, sometimes to the point of like, I don't want to say leverage because that is too corporate. So what?

0:29:19 - (Matt): Somebody will make fun of you. Yeah, that's funny. So anything that is specifically, I don't know, non tech related interests that you have.

0:29:36 - (Lea): I love food and cooking and me both, like obviously the eating part as well, but also like making dishes.

0:29:44 - (Matt): I'm probably more on the eating part.

0:29:45 - (Lea): But I mean that too. Especially before we had a kid, as a hobby we basically would like tour the most interesting restaurants and like actually take photos of each dish and rate it. We had a food blog with my husband. The problem is eventually like this hobby became kind of too intense and too time consuming. Like our photos became more and more elaborate. We ended up like adding a DSLR to the restaurants and like a little portable light and a little shader and the writing about the dishes. Like, and these sometimes were like really long tasting menus.

0:30:18 - (Lea): They were tasting Menus with like 20 dishes and I was writing like their description, the rating, like editing the photo in Lightroom. It went from like this thing that we did while at the restaurant still into like this intense thing that would take like hours. And in the end we had to stop doing it because it was like, it was too time consuming. Especially after we had a kid. It was like, yeah, this is, this is not tenable anymore. We tried doing a few where we intentionally, like, didn't take photos that were as elaborate, but it.

0:30:50 - (Lea): Yeah, yeah, it didn't feel the same. I mean, we, at some point we even had the Michelin guide use some of our photos, which we were very proud of. And obviously cooking as well. I really liked taking a recipe and like basically changing it completely and making it unrecognizable, like making my own version of things. I have a very wide palette, so I love experimenting with like, different tastes, different ingredients.

0:31:11 - (Lea): I have a very wide range of like, what things I like, especially when it comes to savory flavors. I really like exploring like different ingredients, combining ingredients from different cuisines. Yeah, I think probably food related things are like my, my biggest interest outside of tech.

0:31:26 - (Matt): You are originally from Greece. Do you not prefer Greek food having grown up there?

0:31:31 - (Lea): I don't actually. I know that many people's favorite cuisine is the one from the country they grew up in. Like, I have pretty much all of my friends are immigrants. Not Greek necessarily. I have very few Greek friends, but almost all of my friends are immigrants from some country. And usually their favorite cuisine is where they're from. Whereas for me it's just meh, whatever. That's just food. I personally find it kind of boring just because I grew up with it, especially since I grew up in a small place that only had Greek food. Your options, if you didn't want to eat Greek food were basically pizza and.

0:32:07 - (Lea): No, that was it. Even the fast food where I grew up was Greek, like souvlaki and that sort of thing. Even as a kid, I had this like, really strong interest in food. When I was seven, my parents took me to Paris for Disneyland. And what do I remember the most from this trip? Is it Disneyland? No, it is the Chinese restaurants that they took me to. And it was the first time in my life that I was trying Chinese food. That was like my strongest memory. I mean, now that I'm an adult and like, why on earth did they go to France, the capital of food, and eat Chinese restaurants? Why wouldn't they go to French restaurants?

0:32:41 - (Lea): But back then I was just really elated to be trying a different cuisine. Even when we went to Athens, which now Athens is a big city, you could eat practically almost every cuisine in Athens. There are some cuisines that it doesn't have much of and like, there's some cuisines that it doesn't do as well. It has a very wide range of cuisines now, but Back to back when I was little, it wasn't really that much funny.

0:33:02 - (Matt): Yeah. Our experience there, I mean, we really enjoyed the food. It was very fresh. The one thing that I did miss is spicy. There wasn't really much. Not. Not that I noticed. And I was like, yeah, there's not. I need some sriracha or something. But I don't. I don't think that flavor profile is going to work. But I missed the spicy part.

0:33:20 - (Lea): Yeah. Greeks, there is nothing spicy in Greek cuisine, with one exception. There is a. This cheese dip called tiroksteri, which literally means spicy cheese. And they put red peppers in that, and they consider that spicy. It is not that spicy. Like, if you try it, you're probably gonna be like, maybe there's a bit of a kick to it. Like, the Greek palate cannot tolerate spicy food at all because they are not used to it.

0:33:44 - (Lea): Tolerance to spicy food is something you have to build over time. Right. If you grew up in a country where spicy food was available and you tried it as a kid, when you grow up, you will have built that tolerance. Greeks do not build that tolerance unless they are actually interested in other cuisines and then they might like. Because there are options. Especially if you're living in a big city, there are options. I love so many different cuisines. A lot of the food I love is spicy.

0:34:07 - (Lea): But it was something I had to build on as an adult. Like, as a kid, I did not have spicy food.

0:34:12 - (Matt): I very much grew up on a sort of meat and potatoes American diet until, I don't know. I had a friend that take me, took me to a Thai food restaurant for the first time when I was about 22, and I was like, I don't even know what to order. And, you know, she. She ordered for me, and I'm like, I don't really eat spicy food. Like, she's like, oh, just get it. One star. And it's funny to think back now, just a single star. I mean, I was dying. It was. It seems, oh, my God now.

0:34:41 - (Matt): And now I'm just like, ah, that's like, I can barely even notice it, you know? That's funny.

0:34:46 - (Lea): Yeah, it's. It's very much a tolerance thing. Like, if you're used to eating spicy food, you can't even tell whether something is spicy. And I see this with. With us as well. And like, my kid, which is five, and she does not really have any tolerance to spicy food yet, even though we tried. I mean, she. She's too young, um, and things that she calls Spicy. I try them, and it's like, this doesn't even have a kick to it. Where do you see the spiciness?

0:35:12 - (Lea): And yes, Thai is especially the kind of cuisine where if you go to an authentic place, it will be very spicy. Like, even one star or pepper or whatever can be very spicy. I mean, the good thing is that that was probably quite authentic because it wasn't as catered to the Western palate. There are Thai restaurants that are more adjusted to their clientele in a Western place, and they, like, you have to actually order something Thai spicy to have it be properly spicy. And that's like four or something.

0:35:44 - (Matt): Yeah, that's right.

0:35:46 - (Lea): But yeah, well, even for, like, there is this Hunan cuisine place in Cambridge that I really, really like, and it is too spicy for me. Like, most dishes that I want that I like are too spicy for me. So I still order them because they're so tasty. And then I keep eating and I'm like, ow. Oh, my mouth is on fire. But I'm gonna eat more because this.

0:36:08 - (Matt): Is so t. It becomes addictive. Yeah. It's like, oh, oh, I'm sweating.

0:36:13 - (Lea): Oh.

0:36:14 - (Matt): Oh, it's so good. You have to eat more.

0:36:17 - (Lea): Yeah. And if you're eating. If you're eating Indian food, you can also order a lassi, like anything with milk. Especially, like a yogurt type thing. That really helps with the. The spiciness. So, like, with. With Indian food, you can order lassi and, like, drink a sip of lassi, like, after each bite of the really spicy thing. But. And many other spicy. Many other cuisines with a lot of spicy food has something like that.

0:36:42 - (Lea): So you could look into, like, what that is for each cuisine.

0:36:46 - (Matt): Well, you know, maybe Greek food is boring, but I sure do miss a genuine Slovakia and traditional Greek food. It's just. It's not the same here. I can't capture the same thing here.

0:36:59 - (Lea): In the U.S. yeah, I know. I've tried. I've tried. I've actually tried Greek souvlaki a few times, like gyros or something like that here. Even the places that are owned by Greeks where I can go in and order in Greek, it's not the same because they are adjusted to the local. Like, did you know that? I mean, you know, because you've been in Greece. But tzatziki is supposed to be spicy from the garlic, like, a little bit. It's supposed to have a kick to it from the raw garlic.

0:37:23 - (Lea): Here it doesn't. It's like, where is the garlic? Yeah, it's like yogurt with dill. Dill is not even an essential ingredient in tzatziki. In Greece, most tzatziki does not have dill. You can use it, but it's like you're making a variation, you're making a special type of tzatziki. Whereas here they seem to consider it an essential ingredient. It's like it's not tzatziki if it doesn't have dill. I beg to differ.

0:37:45 - (Lea): And, but also I do, when I go to Greece after like a while in the us I do eat Greek food just because I've missed it. And obviously when you visit a country, you want to eat the local food, Right? So when you were visiting Greece as a non Greek, of course you're going to eat the local food. That's what I would do as well if I wasn't Greek. It's just if you're living there, you want to try something different at some point.

0:38:08 - (Matt): Yep, yep, that's right. It's funny, the end of our time too, there was a brand new Thai place that opened up near the square, sort of the town square. We were so excited and it was legitimately quite good. We really missed Mexican food because I'm here on the west coast, so we have good Mexican and the Greek version of Mexican. At least in Ciro, it's like it was a good try. They made a good try at it.

0:38:36 - (Lea): Really?

0:38:37 - (Matt): Yeah.

0:38:37 - (Lea): Okay. That is very surprising because I would consider Mexican one of the cuisines you really can't find good instances of in Greece. Like everything I have seen is basically Tex Mex. I have not seen any actual Mexican restaurant in Greece anywhere. It's, it's all like the, the, the, it's, it's all the Tex Mex stuff. It's a sort of Mexican inspired, but basically like burritos and fajitas. It's like I had not, I have not seen a mole, for example, in any Mexican restaurant in Greece.

0:39:09 - (Matt): Yeah. So it, it was in the ballpark. It was interesting how, how they made certain things. There were certain ingredients that maybe they couldn't even get. I mean, I don't think there weren't black beans. They would use pinto beans, for example, or. And it was funny too because we, we noticed in some of the meat dishes maybe they maybe were making it for a Greek palate because we would notice time and it's like this is not a Mexican herb.

0:39:37 - (Lea): Oh, interesting. Yeah, that might have been it. Also, did you notice that the meat is extremely overcooked in Greece.

0:39:45 - (Matt): Mm. Sometimes. Yeah.

0:39:46 - (Lea): So in most places in Greece, unless you go to a specific, like, to a steakhouse that you know is like a proper steakhouse and knows how to cook proper steak, if you go to, like, an average Greek taverna, they will serve you the meat well done, like, not even pink, like brown throughout, because that's how Greek seated. And until my 20s, I thought I didn't like meat. I was practically a vegetarian almost. I thought that meat is basically something that has the consistency of a shoe soul.

0:40:12 - (Matt): And then once you had it medium rare, like, wow, the world has opened up to new possibilities.

0:40:17 - (Lea): Yeah. Yes. At some point, it was a steakhouse in Oslo, in Norway, and I had an entrecot that was so. That was medium rare and it was so juicy. Meat can be like this. Meat can be this flavorful and this juicy, stick full of flavor. It is nothing like the meat I knew of. And now I love steak.

0:40:42 - (Matt): So we always have to close these nerdshotel conversations with the question about, what is your favorite icon font? Awesome Icon or icon category?

0:40:54 - (Lea): I think my favorite. My two favorite icons, I can't decide between them, is probably the Dumpster Fire icon and the Pooh Storm icon. For basically the. The same reason, like a. They kind of let some of that culture, like, seep out into our work. The fact that we don't take ourselves too seriously. But also, I find it hilarious that, like, in a library, in an icon library that is used so widely, we were able to, like, sneak in these little jokes like that.

0:41:20 - (Lea): And I have actually seen websites that use them, like, unironically. Like, I saw the Dumpster fire icon on website about a browser or a browser plugin or something. It was basically like. It was talking about the mess of, like, Chrome, Chrome Stabs and how Chrome does tabs. And it had, like, the Dumpster fire icon. He was like, look at that. It's not just a joke. It can actually have use cases. Like, of course there are things that you want to talk about where that is the best fit.

0:41:50 - (Lea): But I just. I just love how, like, tongue in cheek they are. And I guess many people do as well, because that's why there are entire podcast episodes about them. Like, there are episodes about both, right?

0:42:02 - (Matt): Yes.

0:42:03 - (Lea): Yeah. So if anyone's curious about how they came about, they could try to look these episodes up.

0:42:10 - (Matt): It's got a commercial for podcast. Awesome. Yeah, it was funny. I was talking to Jory.

0:42:15 - (Lea): Fascinating.

0:42:16 - (Matt): Yeah, I was talking to Jory about. And we sort of always said this. Like, we have these sort of Funny, offbeat icons that maybe start as a joke. And I was saying, you know, we like to create these oddball icons and we don't know, you know, if anyone's really going to use them. And that's actually kind of what we've been saying about these icons. But what we noticed is actually people are using them.

0:42:43 - (Matt): You know, we have many examples of the Pooh Storm icon. Like you said, people are actually using the Dumpster Fire icon. So it's. It's really funny to watch how just sort of the playfulness that we have at Font awesome, we just do things for the sake of it because it's enjoyable and fun for us and that people actually find a legitimate use for it, which is very rewarding.

0:43:08 - (Lea): Oh, yes, yes. I mean, that is the Holy Grail, right? That is the ultimate goal in life, to do what you love and actually add value to the world.

0:43:16 - (Matt): Well, Leah, thank you so much for taking some time. We know you're super busy and especially busy with web awesome stuff right now for folks that are curious about what you're up to. And obviously your fingerprints are all all over the awesome verse, but maybe the side projects that you're working on.

0:43:35 - (Lea): Yes, yes. I have a blog at Leah Varu me and I own pretty much all of the socials. Like, I am on Twitter. I refuse to call it X Twitter. I'm on Mastodon, I'm on Bluesky, I'm on Threads, I'm on Facebook, I'm on LinkedIn, dribble even, although I haven't opened that in, like, years. Or on GitHub, obviously.

0:43:55 - (Matt): We'll make sure to add your. Your MySpace link to the show notes.

0:43:59 - (Lea): So get you connected and my GeoCities website.

0:44:03 - (Matt): There you go, GeoCities. Yep. Yep. 100%. Well, thanks, Leah, for taking some time today.

0:44:08 - (Lea): Thank you as well.

0:44:10 - (Matt): We hope you enjoyed getting a chance to get to know Leah Vroux just a little bit more. It's been awesome to have her on the team. And as always, Podcast awesome is produced and edited by this guy right here, Matt Johnson. And this time I actually got a little bit of extra help from our good friend at Lemon Productions, Chris Ends. So thanks, Chris, for that. The Podcast awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin, and the music interstitials were composed by Zach Moment.