Two tickets for Departure, please (Interview)

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 10 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai. Wix Studio – Wix Sudio is for devs who build websites, sell apps, go headless, or manage clients. Integrate, extend and write custom scripts in a VS code-based IDE. Leverage zero set up dev, test and production environments. Ship faster with an AI code assistant. And work with Wix headless API’s on any tech stack. WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com Featuring: Helena Zhang – LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Tobias Fried – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Show Notes: Project sites Departure Mono Phosphor Icons Fonts mentioned Iosevka Berkeley Mono Commit Mono IBM Plex Unifont Other cool stuff A great library of old PC fonts Somebody made the game from Severance! Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!