Tech culture through working humans.
Thunder Nerds brings technologists and creative practitioners into loose, personality-forward conversations. The show moves from remote leadership and paid media to JavaScript careers, music tools, deathcare technology, JAMstack work, product design, and life outside the screen.
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Thunder Nerds is a technology interview show with the shape of a hangout and the interests of a working product team. It focuses on people in and around software, design, marketing, developer experience, and digital business. The conversations in its episodes are broad, but not random. Remote work, team trust, paid media strategy, JavaScript education, music tools, deathcare platforms, JAMstack, product design, and community resources all appear as part of the same wider question: how technology gets made by actual humans. The room is informal. Introductions are energetic, sponsor reads can become bits, and guests are given space to describe both their work and the parts of life that sit around it. Zach Gottlieb’s appearance brings design platform leadership and remote management into view. Michelle Morgan’s conversation puts paid media targeting, channel choice, and budget focus on the table. Chris Ferdinandi’s episode connects JavaScript, career switching, ADHD, job leverage, and the need to get important promises in writing. Travis Nielsen’s visit moves through design, YouTube Music, Hawaii, and the tactile satisfaction of making sound with physical machines. Faisal Abid’s episode uses technology and deathcare as its business terrain. Davia Tagtashian appears through developer experience, JAMstack, rock climbing, and working from home. Andrea Canistro brings product design, roller derby, visual storytelling, and a zombie-movie ambition into the mix. Chris Vincent Fritz and Hope Wilder appear in an episode connected with resources, Pathfinder Durham, and a playful closing note. Thunder Nerds is strongest when a practical technology question turns conversational: how managers stay available without hovering, how marketers avoid spreading small budgets too thin, how a career decision changes when a contract has real consequences. It keeps the polish loose. That looseness is part of the product: the show lets professional insight arrive with jokes, tangents, callbacks, and visible enthusiasm rather than a scripted expert format.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants developer and design culture through candid practitioner conversations. It especially fits people interested in the overlap between product work, career choices, creative tools, and team dynamics.
What sets it apart: Thunder Nerds stands apart by treating technical work as biography, craft, and workplace reality at once. Its conversations make room for remote management, ad platforms, JavaScript careers, music hardware, deathcare technology, and side interests without sanding off the live-show looseness.
We're a Livestream & Podcast that focuses on real people, their stories, and what makes them tick. We want to really get to know some of our favorite humans in the technology community. We discover how they got where they are, and what fuels the fire of their passion. We put in the hard work, research the heck out of our guests, and put out a darn good show. We hope that we can provide value back to the community in order to inspire others through the stories and lessons that our guests share with us. The show is a resource for professionals in Marketing, Entrepreneurs, Design leaders, and Developers. All of these things go hand-in-hand, as we cover most aspects of how technology happens at…
A remote manager trusts his team; you might start trusting your own career red flags.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A measured conversation about remote leadership, trust, and giving experienced teams room to work.
Thunder Nerds frames remote work as a leadership problem, with Zach Gottlieb, Atlassian's head of design for platform, talking through how trust and autonomy shape his work inside a large design organization.
A grounded paid media discussion about choosing channels before a small budget gets spread too thin.
Paid media can look like a checklist of platforms, but Michelle Morgan keeps pulling the decision back to the audience: where a business's people are, and whether a channel can actually reach them with useful targeting.
A playful JavaScript conversation where career leverage meets non-compete reality.
Chris Ferdinandi comes to Thunder Nerds as the "vanilla JS guy," but the conversation reaches beyond JavaScript instruction into the realities of career expectations and workplace terms.
A tactile design conversation about why the machine can become part of the music.
Designer and musician Travis Nielsen frames physical music-making as a matter of touch: the feel of a knob, the press of a button, and the moment when a machine starts to shape the composition.
A virtual funeral home uses online forms, provincial partners, and Ontario reach to make digitized deathcare feel practical.
Deathcare gets a practical software layer in this Thunder Nerds episode with Basil Abbott, an entrepreneur, Google developer expert, and speaker explaining Irene, a virtual funeral home serving Ontario.
Fast questions, sharper game tangents.
Tech talk with useful detours.
Few questions, long tangents, wherever the conversation goes
Tech skepticism with geek-household fingerprints.
Engineer brain, tech culture, no polish.
Tech talk with everyday chaos attached.
Thunder Nerds talks with Atlassian's Zach Gottlieb about "Team Anywhere," remote hiring, and why 30% of hires are now more than two and a half hours from an office.
Michelle Morgan, an international paid media consultant, writer, and speaker, says she has worked in paid media for over a decade and uses Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook daily.
Chris Ferdinandi says ADHD can qualify as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
A $150 sampler, a guitar pedal, and resampling turn Travis Nielsen's setup into a one-shot instrument.
Thunder Nerds hosts Brian Henson and Frederick Weiss talk with Faisal Abid, a Google developer expert, entrepreneur, and speaker who is building Irene in Ontario.
An interview with Davia Tagtashian, a developer experience engineer at Netlify, discussing her role and working from home.
An interview with UI/UX developer and product designer Andrea Canistro about her career and passion for zombie movies.
Season premiere interview with Chris Vincent Fritz and Hope Wilder discussing UGS resources, Pathfinder Durham, and tech identity, sponsored by Auth0.
An interview with full-stack developer and community organizer Diana Rodriguez about her journey and passion for technology.