CodePen Radio: Recent Episodes
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Marie and I jump on the show to tell y'all we're taking a little break! It feels like years since we've been eluding to the fact that we're working on a new major upgrade to CodePen. Rather than keep dancing around it, we're going to minimize or remove working on anything that isn't working on that. We can't wait to come back for episode 401 and tell you all about it.
Time JumpsSponsor: SplitThis podcast is powered by Split. The Feature Management & Experimentation Platform that reimagines software delivery. By attaching insightful data to feature flags, Split frees you to quickly deploy, measure, and learn the impact of every feature you release. So you can safely deliver features up to 50 times faster and exhale. What a Release.
Start raising feature flags (and lowering stress). Visit Split.io/CodePen for a free trial.
There was a small problem in our database. Some JSON data we kept in a column would sometimes have a string instead of an integer. Like {"tabSize": "5"} instead of {"tabSize": 5} of the like. Investigation on how that happened was just silly stuff like not calling parseInt on a value as it came off a
One way to fix this? Fix any bad data going into the DB, then write a script to fix all the data in the DB. This is exactly the approach I took at first, and it would have absolutely fixed this problem.
But Alex took a step back and looked at the problem a bit wider, and we ended up building some tools that helped us solve this problem, and solve future problems related to this. For one, we built a more permission JSON parser that would not panic on something as easy to fix as a string-as-int problem. This worked by way of some Go reflection that could tell what types the data was supposed to be and coerce them if possible. But what should the value fall back to if it's not savable? That was another tool we built to set the default values of Go structs to be potentially other values than what the defaults for their types are. And since this is all in the realm of data validation, we built another tool to validate the data in Go structs against constraints, so we can always keep the data they contain good.
Once all these tools were in place, the new script to fix the data was much easier to write. Just call the safe JSON function to fix the data and put it back. And the result is a cleaned up code base and tools we can use for data safety for the long term.
Time JumpsSponsor: SplitThis podcast is powered by Split. The Feature Management & Experimentation Platform that reimagines software delivery. By attaching insightful data to feature flags, Split frees you to quickly deploy, measure, and learn the impact of every feature you release. So you can safely deliver features up to 50 times faster and exhale. What a Release.
Start raising feature flags (and lowering stress). Visit Split.io/CodePen for a free trial.
Stephen and I hop on the podcast to chat about some of our recent tooling, local development, and DevOps work. A little while back, we cleaned up our entire monorepo's circular dependency problems using Madge and elbow grease. That kind of thing usually isn't the biggest of deals and the kind of thing a super mature bundler like webpack deals with, but other bundlers might choke on. Later, we learned that we had more dependency issues like inter-package circular dependencies (nothing like production deployments to keep you honest) and used more tooling (shout out npx depcheck) to clean more of it up. Workspaces in a monorepo can also paper over missing dependencies — blech.
Another change was moving off using a .dev domain for local development, which oddly actually caused some strange and hard-to-diagnose DNS issues sometimes. We're on .test now, which should never be a public TLD.
Time JumpsSponsor: NotionNotion is an amazing collaborative tool that not only helps organize your company’s information but helps with project management as well. We know that all too well here at CodePen, as we use Notion for countless business tasks. Learn more and get started for free at notion.com. Take your first step toward an organized, happier team, today.
I was asked about the paradoxical nature of CodePen itself recently. CodePen needs to be safe and secure, yet we accept and gleefully execute user-authored code, which is like don't-do-that 101 in web security. Marie and I hop on the show to talk this through as an update from quite a long time ago. It's wonderfully-terribly complicated. Part of what complicates it is that there are many different kinds of worrisome code, from malicious, to distasteful, to spam, and they all need different treatment. This is a daily and never-ending war.
Time JumpsSponsor: NotionNotion is an amazing collaborative tool that not only helps organize your company’s information but helps with project management as well. We know that all too well here at CodePen, as we use Notion for countless business tasks. Learn more and get started for free at notion.com. Take your first step toward an organized, happier team, today.
Robert and I jump on the podcast to have a little chat about open source generally and what we do with open source at CodePen. CodePen itself is not open source, aside from the small bits we've made public and the open-source things we include within it. But all Public Pens on CodePen are open source, so we certainly handle a lot of it! Enough that I felt comfortable making our Mastodon presence on Fosstodon, which is an open-source-focused instance.
Time JumpsSponsor: SplitThis podcast is powered by Split. The Feature Management & Experimentation Platform that reimagines software delivery. By attaching insightful data to feature flags, Split frees you to quickly deploy, measure, and learn the impact of every feature you release. So you can safely deliver features up to 50 times faster and exhale. What a Release.
Start raising feature flags (and lowering stress). Visit Split.io/CodePen for a free trial.
Marie and I hop on the show to discuss our recently released Most Hearted of 2022 Pens. We only did the calculations the day before, so this is more of a first reaction than a deep dive.
- Congrats to Hyperplexed for #1 and a massive year on CodePen. Last one entry on the Top 100, and this year, nine. "Full layouts" like this appeared a number of times, including Aysenur Turk, last year's winner, at #13 with Liquid Transition Effect, and there were two NFT-themed landing pages (1, 2) in the Top 100.
- A lot of Pens attract attention when they have that "I could use this" feel to them, demonstrated by Ryan Mulligan's Logo Wall at #2!
- High five to Greensock for taking #3 with a re-creation of Brian Cross' lovely Pen. The tag "gsap" was used a ton in the Top 100.
- Jon Kantner took #4 and 10 other spots making this the most appearances on the Top 100 list ever, and also took a spot with a Pen made on December 13th! Aaron Iker and Yoav Kadosh both had 4 spots.
- Perhaps my favorite because of the deep CSS trickery involved was Scott Kellum's Apple inspired pride clock. Scott has the oldest account of anyone in the list, over 10 years old! Huge fan of Steve Gardener's joke, though as well.
- 11 of the Top 100 were created for CodePen Challenges.
Time JumpsSponsor: NotionNotion is an amazing collaborative tool that not only helps organize your company’s information but helps with project management as well. We know that all too well here at CodePen, as we use Notion for countless business tasks. Learn more and get started for free at notion.com. Take your first step toward an organized, happier team, today.
Rach lives in Australia, so for our otherwise U.S.-based team, that's about as remote as it gets. We've always been remote at CodePen, so we have it built-in to our culture already, but that doesn't mean we don't have to plan for it, think about it, and adjust things to make sure we're all doing the best we can. Writing is a fundamental aspect of it all, but even that is funny sometimes because you have to choose where those words will go that make the most sense. Right now, it's a balance between Notion, GitHub, Slack, and even our codebase itself.
Time JumpsSponsor: SplitThis podcast is powered by Split. The Feature Management & Experimentation Platform that reimagines software delivery. By attaching insightful data to feature flags, Split frees you to quickly deploy, measure, and learn the impact of every feature you release. So you can safely deliver features up to 50 times faster and exhale. What a Release.
Start raising feature flags (and lowering stress). Visit Split.io/CodePen for a free trial.
Marie and Chris talk about the year in CodePen Challenges. If you participate, this might be an interesting look into how we think about them. If you don't, it might help you understand what they are and how they might just tickle your fancy.
Time JumpsSponsor: SplitThis podcast is powered by Split. The Feature Management & Experimentation Platform that reimagines software delivery. By attaching insightful data to feature flags, Split frees you to quickly deploy, measure, and learn the impact of every feature you release. So you can safely deliver features up to 50 times faster and exhale. What a Release.
Start raising feature flags (and lowering stress). Visit Split.io/CodePen for a free trial.
Dee and Chris chat about our latest take on Project Management (PM), a somewhat tricky topic for us with such a small team where literally everyone is an individual contributor (IC) with a lot on their shoulders aside from PM.
We're attempting a project of large scale, so part of what has helped us so far is scoping the project into phases releases. That way work that we know is in a later release can be put off until we're literally working on that release. Without at least that prioritization, things would take much longer. The releases are also chunked into sub-projects with a no-too-little and not-too-big quality, and within those projects is where the kan-baning happens. If we can keep the whole team on one project (or at least a group of 2-3), it limits the context switching which also helps speed and productivity.
We use Notion for most of this work, and it's been nice to keep literally all of it (all the way up through all the phases) in one big database, then we scope the views down to phases and projects and cards. Each card we make sure has a very actionable tone to it and includes everything one might need to finish the task, including decisions, previous conversations, relevant other tickets, etc. Each card has things you might expect like who is working on it, the current status, whether it's blocked or not, and several other useful bits of metadata. It also contains time estimates, so we can, at a glance, see how far we've come and what's left on any given project. We know things like time estimates can change quite a bit, but everyone is well aware of that and isn't beholden to the numbers. It just gives us some idea of what is going on other than feeling like we're entirely driving blind. Each week we take a look at the progress together as a team.
Time JumpsSponsor: SplitThis podcast is powered by Split. The Feature Management & Experimentation Platform that reimagines software delivery. By attaching insightful data to feature flags, Split frees you to quickly deploy, measure, and learn the impact of every feature you release. So you can safely deliver features up to 50 times faster and exhale. What a Release.
Start raising feature flags (and lowering stress). Visit Split.io/CodePen for a free trial.
TypeScript ain't exactly new, but it's a bit new to us. Robert was the most knowledgeable about TypeScript on the team and felt like it could be valuable for us. What does that mean though? Where would we use TypeScript? What blockers were there? What does it actually help with? The implementation hasn't been trivial, so has it been worth it? Will it be worth it? Robert, Chris, and Stephen discuss.
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Marie and I talk about what's going on in the world of social media, and what that might mean for CodePen and front-end developers. Twitter doesn't feel particularly healthy at the moment, but has been the biggest player for front-end developers for a lot of years. Are we moving? Not? Where?
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One thing that's been keeping us very busy at CodePen is moving our main API. We decided on GraphQL long ago and it's served us pretty well. We originally built it in Ruby on Rails alongside a lot of the rest of our app. But while Rails served us well, we've been moving off of it. We like our React architecture and we're better served leaning into that, with frameworks like Next, than staying on Rails. We proved out this combination of technologies for ourselves, building a whole set of admin tools with it. Now we're ready to keep that train going as we build out more of CodePen with the same stack. But removing Rails means moving off of our Rails-based GraphQL implementation. This means re-writing that API in Go, another bit of tech we've had a lot of luck with.
Turns out that re-writing an API is more time-consuming than writing it to begin with, especially as we need to run them side-by-side and behave identically. No refactoring allowed! Unless of course we want to refactor it on both sides and take even more time.
Dee joined me this week in talking about all this. It's a huge job! But we've been doing well at it, building our own tooling, doing lots of testing, and ultimately proving that it works by releasing it in small areas on the production site. It's all working out how we hoped it would: fast, cheap, and easier to reason about.
Time Jumps
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Robert and I jump on to chat about Cloudflare's product Durable Objects. It's part of their Workers platform, which we already use at CodePen a good bit, but with Durable Objects...
Global Uniqueness guarantees that there will be a single instance of a Durable Object class with a given ID running at once, across the world. Requests for a Durable Object ID are routed by the Workers runtime to the Cloudflare data center that owns the Durable Object.
In their intro blog post a few years back, they call the "killer app" real-time collaborative document editing, which is obviously of interest to us. So we've been tinkering and playing with how that might work with CodePen's future technology.
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Sponsor: Equinix Metal’s Startup Partner Program Equinix Metal’s Startup Partner Program helps early stage companies level up. Their experts work with startups like Koord and INVISV to build their competitive edge with infrastructure. Equinix Metal provides real time guidance and support to help startups grow faster. With up to $100,000 in infrastructure credit, access to Equinix’s global ecosystem of over 10,000 customers and 1,800 networks, they might just be what you need to take your startup global.
Visit metal.equinix.com/startups to take your startup to the next level.
A few months back, Alex and I did a 10-year anniversary episode that took the form of 10 bits of advice formed in the fires of running a software company for a decade. That was us talking at you. We thought it would be fun to turn the tables and have you talk at us in the form of an Ask-Me-Anything follow-up to that 10-year show.
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This week I got to speak with Hakim El Hattab. I feel pretty special as Hakim told me he doesn't do public stuff very often. I get it! He's a busy man with a family, a successful company, and ambitious other projects. I think of Hakim as the master of simple but satisfying UI concepts that have a way of becoming bigger than demos. Consider Ladda, which you can find as part of his personal site, which is a button that expands to show a spinner. This concept started with Hakim and has now made its way to surely hundreds or thousands of websites, some as big as Slack and some as awesome as CodePen itself.
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Sponsor: Equinix Metal Equinix Metal’s Startup Partner Program helps early-stage companies level up. Their experts work with startups like GenesysGo and Cuemby to build their competitive edge with infrastructure. Equinix Metal provides real-time guidance and support to help startups grow faster. With up to $100,000 in infrastructure credit, access to Equinix’s global ecosystem of over 10,000 customers and 1,800 networks, they might just be what you need to take your startup global.
Visit metal.equinix.com/startups to take your startup to the next level.
This week I got to talk to Kristopher Van Sant! Again! This time we got to talk about Kristopher's professional work as well as some favorite Pens.
Time Jumps
Sponsor: Equinix Metal’s Startup Partner Program
Equinix Metal’s Startup Partner Program helps early stage companies level up. Their experts work with startups like GenesysGo and Cuemby to build their competitive edge with infrastructure. Equinix Metal provides real time guidance and support to help startups grow faster. With up to $100,000 in infrastructure credit, access to Equinix’s global ecosystem of over 10,000 customers and 1,800 networks, see why startups choose Equinix Metal. It’s not just about the infrastructure, it's about the people behind it. Are you ready to go global?
Visit metal.equinix.com/startups to take your startup to the next level.
We just recently published the 300th CodePen Spark. Marie joins me on the show, as she leads up the creation of the vast majority of Spark newsletters. We get into things like why we do it, how we create it, how we send it, and things we’ve learned along the way sending a newsletter of […]
In this show, Stephen and Chris get to talk about an internal technical detail we were improving in our database, which led to a public-facing feature for y’all. The idea is that all (most, anyway) database tables should have a deleted_at column. When you query against them, under regular circumstances, any rows that have a […]
CodePen will host your assets, like images, data models, libraries, whatever. It’s quite useful! They are easy to browse, easy to copy URLs or code snippets of usage, served with the right headers from a fast global CDN, and heck, we’ll even help optimize them. It’s easy to amass a lof of them, as we […]
Marie and I this week! Marie dug up some interesting data about “external library” usage on CodePen. In the Pen Editor (specifically), you have the option of adding external resources. These are literally placed in the Settings area and added to the end of your HTML. We’re specifically focused on these (not scripts you might […]
This week I got to speak with Jake Albaugh. Long-time listeners will remember Jake as an alumnus of Team CodePen. That’s a first for a podcast guest! We looked back a bit, where Marie dug up some of the best Jake classic Pens, and talked with him about what his professional life has looked like […]
Both Alex and I, the co-founders of CodePen, spent time trying to whittle down hopefully interesting and practical advice for you from our experience in running a SaaS company for a decade! Let’s go back and forth, combining into a top 10 like we did in the show. 🔟 Alex: The High Low Principle Only […]
This week I got to speak with Lee Martin! Lee is a fascinating fella, due in part to him having a job I think we all want: designing weird cool digital experiences for good bands. Fortunately for us, he often writes about them. Just check out the Inter Dimensional Video Player for Lord Huron, for […]
This week I got to speak with Jase Smith, a kindred spirit bouncing across the designer/developer line out of Denver, Colorado. Before you know it, we’re doing a bit of a rundown of Jase’s career path, all the way from that all-too-familiar fake-it-til-you-make it early days to being a successful developer and mentoring as a […]
This week I got to speak with Ilithya, who put together some favorite Pens, some of which we actually manage to get to during the show 😂. Like our chat with Lea Rosema, we really get into the magic of Shaders. Shaders are certainly of the web, but often feel extraordinary, giving off a “the […]
This week I got to speak with Craig Roblewsky! Craig does a lot of web animation and hangs around the Greensock forums quite a bit, giving him a unique perspective on solving animation problems and coming up with clever solutions to them. Craig has his own site, motiontricks.com, as well which is an educational resource […]
This week I got to speak with Kevin Powell! Kevin has had tremendous success on YouTube educating people about CSS ‘n’ friends. But like so many good content creators, he’ll meet with where you are at and what you need — his personal site has written articles, resources, courses, and a newsletter. Kevin is a […]
This week Shaw and Chris dig into some deepnerd tech stuff: manipulating HTML. In a perfect world, perhaps we wouldn’t need to, but today, and even moreso in the foreseeable future of CodePen, we need to do a smidge of HTML manipulation on the HTML that you write or that is generated by code you […]
This week Marie and Chris get together to chat about what’s been hot hot hot on CodePen lately. We’ve discovered there is a really taking to the creamy cardstock look, for one thing. Typography is always great, but we’re seeing more typographic trickery often including variable fonts. While not new, there are still loads of […]
I got to speak to Jon Kantner! Jon is an incredibly prolific creator, and I believe has the most appearances in the CodePen Spark of any creator. Like so many other creators I’ve talked to Jon also shares what he knows in a variety of ways, like writing (see his personal site, or articles he […]
This week I got to speak with Alex Trost! Alex has been hard at work created Frontend Horse, a clever brand celebrating the beautiful and clever things in our industry via a newsletter, articles, streaming, a Discord community and more. This is the way to do it! Time Jumps Sponsor: Notion Notion is an amazing […]
This week I got to speak with Chris Smith! We got to talk about all sorts of things from blogging, to pushing the boundaries of CSS, to logic in CSS, to digging into some of Chris’ most interesting Pens, to Chris’ actual favorite Pen of all time. Time Jumps Sponsor: React Summit Ken Wheeler, Tejas […]
I got to talk with Lea Rosema this week! She’s an incredibly talented digital artist and front-end developer. She does quite a bit of art with some of the trickiest web technology out there: shaders! But rather than just learn it and use it, she helps other people learn and get more out of it. […]
I got to talk with Micah Godbolt this week! Micah is is a long-hauler at Microsoft working on Design Systems and such. His CodePen account looks a lot like mine: steady consistent usage of “just trying to figure something out” Pens sprinkled with some ideas that somehow seem to click with the wider front-end world. […]
I got to talk to Paulina Hetman this week! Paulina is a heck of a creative coder, using her skills as an illustrator and all-around web developer to make ideas come to life. And she doesn’t keep all those ideas to herself, she spends time educating other budding developers both professionally and by building courses […]
Klare is moving on from design at CodePen to design at GitHub. Huge congrats Klare! If you didn’t know Klare was our one and only dedicated designer here at CodePen and left a massive mark here in the design and UX of CodePen, the app, as well as internally in our organization practices. I’m talking […]
I got to talk to Varun! Varun is an incredible artist and would have been interesting to talk with him about literally anything, but since he’s dipped numerous toes into the world of NFTs, I wanted to chat with him about that in conjunction with his own art and other artists he’s a fan of. […]
This week I got a chance to talk to Kyle Shook. Kyle has started a new job at Foxtrot so we talked about what that process was like. In addition to creating all sorts of incredibly creative work on CodePen (just look at this Collection of Menus), Kyle helps other people level up their front-end […]
This week I got to speak with Chris Nager! I’ve known Chris quite a while. I remember being inspired by his hand-drawn SVG plus symbol and subsequent guide to
If you Command (Mac) or Control (PC) click the Fork button, it will open the newly forked Pen in a new tab in your browser. That’s new behavior. Before, it would open the fork in the same tab, no matter how you click. That was unfortunate, as Cassie called out: Why didn’t it work like […]
I got to talk to Sarah Fossheim this week! One of the impressive things that Sarah does is near photograph-quality recreations of iconic old technology in HTML & CSS. I enjoyed the fact that neither of us quite totally knows what some of these machines even did, but appreciate their incredible aesthetics. Perhaps my favorite […]
I had tons of fun talking to Tiffany Choong this week! I loved learning her process on creating countless code art Pokémon characters. Just look at it and wing it! Wild. While I’m not nearly as creative as Tiffany, I feel some kinship looking through her Pens. Like how there are all these amazingly creative […]
I got to chat with CJ Gammon this week! CJ is a creative technologist, a term he’s tried to hang onto as he does more development work, so he can continue to communicate that he’s a designer as well. CJ has been at Adobe for nearly 10 years and has played with a huge variety […]
This week I get to talk to Ryan Mulligan! Ryan put together a Collection of some of his personal picks for favorite Pens and we get a chance to talk through a lot of them. There are some classic moments here I really feel, like when something you consider pretty basic gets way more popular […]
I got to talk with Amit Sheen this week about his journey into creative coding. Even his early work is incredibly interesting and recent work is downright stunning. Now he’s entering a phase of sharing what he knows with workshops like Pushing CSS to the Limit. Here’s a list of Pens we talk about in […]
I grabbed Adam intending to chat about all sorts of CSS stuff and his work at Google and on VisBug. But then we chatted pretty much the entire time about color and what’s coming there to the web platform. Time Jumps Sponsor: WordPress.com WordPress.com is the fastest way to spin up a WordPress site. You’ll […]
We’ve got Steve Gardner on this week! We get into all sorts of nitty gritty detail on the ol’ Christmas Cannon, a Pen of pure joy. Steve has some absolute classics that show off the web at it’s very best, like the Airplanes Pen. Can’t beat Steve’s cleverness and execution. Time Jumps Sponsor: Netlify Quirrel […]
Louis Hoebregts (aka Mamboleoo) has been creating wonderfully creative Pens on CodePen for many years. His early work, as we learn on this episode, was inspired by the CSS trickery of Lea Verou! He rotates his tools between HTML and CSS, SVG, and canvas, but tends to have an aspect of motion and the unexpected. […]
Aysenur Turk had a number of appearances on this year’s Top Hearted of 2021, including #1! In this podcast, I get to catch up with her, find out where she gets ideas and inspiration, how much time it takes to build something like her amazing layouts, and what her favorites are. Time Jumps Sponsor: Retool […]
As you read this, CodePen is 100% on PostgreSQL for our main relational database. It was a transition that took a couple weeks of pretty intense effort, and lots of planning and prep before that. I’ve got Alex on the show to talk about it, as he was the main instigator and led the effort, […]
It’s back! We counted up all the hearts given to every Pen created in 2021 and created a list of the top 100. Marie and Chris chat about this year’s list. Who’s on it, what’s on it, and digging into the numbers where we can. Remember that people can heart pens up to 3 times […]
Olivia Ng has done loads of wonderful work here on CodePen and off (check out her super cool travel bucket list site) She got started just out of pure desire to build things. “I just really like the internet” she told me. Hear hear! Her eye for design takes all her work to the next […]
Jhey Tompkins is one of the most prolific CodePen creators out there! Find him as @jh3y on CodePen and @jh3yy on Twitter. His creations tend to have a twist of whimsey while being beautifully designed as well as pushing the platform in unique ways. You’ll always be surprised at a Jhey Pen! I talk with […]
Rachel and Chris dig into the many, many ways in which we use Notion at CodePen. Heads up, Notion has sponsored a couple of episodes of CodePen Radio lately, but not this. It’s just a tool we heavily use and this podcast is all about that sort of thing. Heck, this podcast itself was planned […]
You might recognize Ben Evans from his absolutely incredible CSS “paintings”, like the portrait of his daughter or the still life. Paintings aren’t the quite word as Ben designs them all to be entirely scalable. And sometimes they have interactivity, like the slight parallax in the Vaccum from Space. Like so many other great artists, […]
This week I talk with Gabrielle Wee, who’s done loads of creative coding work here on CodePen but like so many other creative people we talk to, her creativity explodes into so many other areas like illustration, photography, drawing, and even gardening. Plus a desire to share those techniques. Her path has led her to […]
Today I get the pleasure of talking with Aaron Iker. Aaron builds incredibly delightful bits and bobs of UI that give you the feeling of hey, I bet I could actually use this! And that’s exactly what Aaron wants you to do. He takes care to make sure the code is easy for you to […]
We’ve been naming all our services cp____ lately. Get it? cp is short for CodePen. Clever, I know. We have many such services. The latest to join them is cpshots. We’ve been doing our own screenshotting for a long time now, but like all software we’re always working on it for various everchanging reasons. Robert […]
Chris and Shaw talk about how CodePen uses Cloudflare Works with the KV storage to power several things on CodePen. We do some cool stuff with them, like serve landing pages with the content provided by WordPress yet served on an entirely different Ruby on Rails powered site. We also serve up assets through them […]
Marie and Chris talk about CodePen Challenges, which have been going strong for many years now. The gist is that you pop in and make something along a theme. The “challenge” is doing the work (they aren’t meant to be tricky otherwise). We’ve seen people seriously level up their skills by participating, but of course, […]
Chris gets to chat with George Francis, an incredible digital artist in the generative art space as well as educator and all-around developer. George has been all over the place lately, producing really outstanding work (CSS-Tricks uses a Houdini paint worklet from George in the header and footer). Not only does George make art that […]
Rachel and Chris chat all things Apollo GraphQL. Apollo is in this weird category of software where like by far most websites do not need it or anything like it. But for CodePen, we consider it nearly essential. The typical sales pitch for GraphQL applies to us for sure (e.g. only ask for the data […]
Lynn Fisher is my guest this week! You might know her as @lynnandtonic on CodePen and most other platforms. We get to talk about her A Single Div project and all the CSS magic that goes into those, other creative projects and why those are so satisfying, a recent transition over to Netlify, and the […]
ES Modules are a native feature of JavaScript! The import and export keywords are actually a mighty powerful thing for a language to have. You can use them right on CodePen of course. For example, with our URL extensions, you can export stuff from one Pen and import it in another without having to use […]
Cassie Evans is our special guest this week! Cassie is a front-end developer with a special talent and passion for animation and SVG, as evidenced in part by her amazing work on CodePen. She’s recently became part of the team over at Greensock, a very popular JavaScript-powered animation framework. We got to talk specifically about […]
There are lots of types of dragging that can happen on websites. While they are all click (or tap), hold down, move, and let go, they are all quite a bit different. For instance: Drag files/folders onto the browser window and drop them. The likely use case there is uploading. Drag an element on the […]
Chris & Shaw talk about a big ol’ conversion to getting CodePen’s color system to use --custom-properties all the way through, rather than Sass variables. Why? All sorts of reasons, kinda boiling down to the fact that they are just better. Here’s a tiny one: you can use the Web Inspector and see what some […]
New CodePen team member! As we recorded this, it was just Robert’s 2nd day at CodePen, and we snuck this podcast in within the hurricane of stuff happening during that time. There is a pile of new software to get access to and acquainted with. There is the dev environment stuff. There is getting acquainted […]
Dee and Chris talk about “everything money-related” at CodePen. Dee has been managing this stuff since CodePen’s beginning. First largely pro-bono (sorry, Dee), then later as a side gig and part-time job. Dee is full-time now at CodePen, but finance stuff is only part of her role (programming being the main job). It’s a lot […]
Our goal here was to explore server-side rendering (SSR) in Next.js using data from Apollo GraphQL, for faster client-rendering and SEO benefits. There are a variety of approaches, but Shaw has set his sights on a very developer-ergonomic version here where you can leave queries on individual components and mark them as SSR-or-not. There are […]
Chris & Marie talk about a big long project that we’ve finished at CodePen: our new Admin Tools. Any web app is gonna need ’em. They do stuff that is unique to customer service on your app. Say you need to manually trigger a password reset email or hand-verify an account. You look them up […]
Marie and Chris talk about all the sources of data we have, think about, and use to help us. We do have one main database on CodePen, and truth be told, it’s got a bunch of data in it. If we want to know how many Pens there are, we can just ask it. We […]
Chris and Klare chat about the incredibly daunting task of planning a project that is huge and long-term. We know we’re pretty OK at planning smaller-scale projects. We plan, we kanban, we get the job done. But a single basic kanban isn’t going to cut it for a truly gigantic project. We get into talking […]
Chris & Alex talk about DevOps, servers, and keeping CodePen online at all times. We were are 100% for the year until a few weeks ago when we had a 10 minute drop. That still keeps us in the realm of 99.99% uptime, where we get 52 minutes and 35 seconds of downtime per year, […]
Chris and Stephen pick out a couple of components from our design pattern library (which we talked about last here) and go into why they exist, what they do, what makes them complex, and the API choices. Relatively new to us is the idea of compound components which have, so far, been good to us […]
Chris and Stephen talk about the New Embed Modal. We got to re-architect the thing into our modern stack, using all our latest design patterns, and improve the UX of it quite a bit while we were at it. This is something like the 4th generation of that experience, and we’re already eyeing up future […]
Chris and Marie talk about customer support. If you’re a regular listener of this show, you’ll remember that we’ve had a lot of success with customer support over the last year, the point that our volume of direct support is rather low. That’ll happen when you fix every major problem that comes up. But it […]
Chris & Marie talk about some of the types of Pens that have been particularly popular this year so far, now that’s we’re halfway through it. There is still plenty of time to make the best-of-the-year list (you could make a Pen the third week of December and still make it!). Heads up though, giving […]
Dee and Chris talk about a recent release where we re-built the upgrade experience on CodePen. For example, you’re a free user, you want to upload an asset, you can upload via a modal that pops up, and get on with your task. You could kind of do that before, but it was much jankier […]
A big milestone for us! We’re now well over that number of registered users on CodePen. It’s a fun number to watch — but we know it’s not a particularly useful or industry-standard metric. Monthly active users, for example, is much more meaningful. In this podcast, Marie and Chris reminisce a bit on the early […]
Learn CSS is a very cool project from a whole team of people at Google (and outside). It does a great job of documenting where is right now, in a fairly comprehensive way. Learn CSS was spearheaded by Una Kravets and Andy Bell did the bulk of the writing, so they are two extra-special guests […]
Stephen and Chris talk about cplibrary the Pattern Library that the CodePen Monorepo can use to share components. What goes in there and what doesn’t? What are common and not-so-common components? Can components be combinations of other components? Time Jumps Sponsor: Lemon Productions Chris Enns of Lemon Productions edits this podcast. Got a podcast you […]
When Anna Lytical heard Stephen and I talking about “What is CodePen?” she mentioned we did fab without her. So of course, I had to do one with her! Anna creates fun coding content all over the web, in addition to being an engineer at Google. Catch her on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. For […]
I got to chat with Stephanie this week, a senior web engineer at Microsoft, who I’ve given the prestigious gold-star award for top front-end web development content producer this year ;). She’s got so many cool projects like Modern CSS, Style Stage, SmolCSS, and a beginner course on making a website. So many of the […]
Adam Created this brand new intro video animation for CodePen Radio (on TV). Like when we do a video instead of audio for the podcast. We got to get into his creative process a little bit. While the output of this was a video, Adam used web technology to produce it, using animation libraries like […]
Over the last year, almost every metric that you want to go up has gone up at CodePen. More users creating and doing more things. You’d think that customer support would go up at the same level. And if it did, we would have thought that was very normal and dealt with it. But customer […]
Marie and Chris discuss the big round of updates that went out around Team Management. There is a new “admin” role that it took us years of having a Teams product to understand that many teams could actually use. In the end, these updates to how Teams work make them way more useful. Teams can […]
Being, ya know, human beings with thoughts and emotions trying to build something together, sometimes we clash. There are big clashes. Sometimes those end in drastic changes. We’ve done that. You might have noticed that we’re down to two co-founders actively at the company. There are tiny clashes too, like needing to tell someone when […]
This isn’t actually a podcast actually talking about what CodePen is. Well, it kinda is. But actually it’s Stephen and Chris talking about and planning for what they would say if they only had five minutes (or so) to explain what CodePen is. So we need to hash out what the most important things are, […]
Marie & Chris talk about the brand new event tracking feature in Appcues. We’re still pretty stoked we can even afford Appcues, since it’s super pricey software for our company. The fact that they just released event tracking dashboards makes it feel much more affordable though, because this unlocks super valuable information for us instantly. […]
We talked about our transition to a monorepo back in episode 305. This move has all sorts of advantages for us, like the simplicity of having a single repo to pull and be up to date with and linting/formatting code in a consistent way across the entire code base of CodePen. This time we’ll get […]
Dee, Chris, and Alex talk all about the technology of Elasticsearch. That’s a link to the company itself right there, which is relevant as we use them directly to host our production Elasticsearch. We use it for (wait for it): search. But interestingly enough, that’s not all. Elasticsearch is just a data store that can […]
In this episode, Klare and Chris talk about speaking to users directly about CodePen to get their feedback and as much other intel as we can in the spirit of making CodePen better and validating some ideas for future features. Timejumps Sponsor: Netlify We had a question come in over on ShopTalk Show from a […]
A Go-person? A Golanger? A person who’s good at Go, anyway. That’s who we’d like to hire at CodePen, at the senior level. In this podcast, we chat about how we’re thinking about this new role, why Go has been so important to us so far, and what we hope to do with it. We […]
(This is a video podcast. Feel free to watch on our YouTube channel instead of downloading if you experience any issues.) The Editor View, perhaps the most important view on CodePen, is just one of many! In this video, Chris Coyier and Stephen Shaw look at all the different views, from the basic Full Page […]
Alex and Chris talk about the glory that is having all of CodePen’s code base in a single repository. This was a slow journey of a couple of years. The biggest step was what jokingly named “CodePen in Stereo” which involved consolidating everything Node-based on CodePen (mostly a bunch of lambdas) into a single repo, […]
As Alex puts it, and as evidenced by the Falkor header on our Notion planning board, security at CodePen is a NeverEnding Story. Not in an ugkadh this project will never end sense, but in that there is always some patch to stay on top of, some newly-evolving best practice to follow, or some new […]
Stephen and I dig into just about every way that ES Modules are relevant on CodePen. They are extremely wonderful. The fact that browsers support native import/export for JavaScript, and the existence of amazing projects like Skypack which bring the npm ecosystem to ES Modules, opens up all sorts of doors on CodePen. We look […]
While CodePen itself is about 8.5 years old as I write, Rach was part of the first round of hires we ever did, and has crossed the ever-so-rare and round-of-applause worthy 5-year milestone. She blogged it as well. So has Marie! Both of them join me (Chris) in a chat about that half-decade of life […]
Chris & Stephen take a look at CodePen Projects (docs), which, for the time, is an entirely different thing than Pens. Rather than just the 3 editors: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—you have a file system to work with, with arbitrary files and folders like you’re used to with a desktop code editor like VS Code […]
You’ve got two options for customzing your profile on CodePen, and endless possibility: Open to everyone: Apply Custom CSS (which can be a link to a Pen on CodePen) PRO only: Apply a Pen-as-Header-Background In this video, Chris & Stephen look at a bunch of awesome profiles on CodePen, and find that many users (especially […]
CPHub is just the name of an internal project (“CodePen Hub”) that we’ve released in the last couple of weeks. You (as a user) won’t notice a thing (except, perhaps, that some of our processors have been upgraded, like RubySass to DartSass). But for us, we notice, because not only does it do everything we […]
Chris and Marie talk through some of the data about the most hearted Pens of 2020. Marie loves pouring over data, and often uses Airtable to do that and help visualize it. This allowed us to figure out some of the top “categories” of the Pens that made the list, longtimers vs. brand new community […]
Chris Coyier and Stephen Shaw have a look at the Top Hearted Pens of 2020, which is always an amazing collection of work. AUDIO WARNING: So sorry about my (Chris’) audio. It was bad. We’re working on it. Sponsor: WordPress.com New year; new you. Spin up that site you’ve been meaning to build on WordPress.com. […]
Marie and Chris take a look back at the features, fixes, and infrastructure work Team CodePen did throughout 2020.
Dee, Marie, and Chris talk about behind the scenes updates to dramatically improve CodePen Projects.
At the end of the year we're in a bug-bashing mood. Chris and Marie are on to talk bug fixing, and dig into the behind-the-scenes on the last 10 bugs we fixed.
Marie, Chris, Stephen, and Klare talk about the apps and services that they're thankful for this year.
Chris, Stephen, and Marie are talking bundles: bundles of software, bundling things in software, and how that all relates to making CodePen better.
Marie and Chris are on to talk about what's changed, what's been improved, and what was removed in our revamp of the Projects editor.
Chris, Stephen, and Marie talk about developing with packages and CodePen's upcoming Skypack integration.
How do you learn to work with something that has, like, no docs at all? How do you code something that nobody's ever written about? It's tricky, but with some sleuthing it can be done! Marie and Stephen are on to talk strategies for solving coding mysteries.
Besides meetings, how does your company communicate what everyone is working on each week? Meetings? Reports? Klare, Chris, and Marie talk about CodePen's use of weekly team docs to keep our fully remote team up to date.
We're celebrating 200 issues of our newsletter, The Spark! Chris and Marie are on to talk about how we put our email newsletter together each week, what kind of content goes in The Spark, and how the process of sending it has evolved over almost 4 years.
Marie and Chris talk about the recent changes to your homepage on CodePen - the one you see when you're logged in and looking for inspiration. What's new with the Trending, Following, and Your Work tabs?
Marie and Stephen talk about adding AVIF support to CodePen Asset hosting - most importantly, how do you pronounce AVIF? What is AVIF? How does AVIF compare with WebP? And how was AVIF support added to CodePen?
Klare, Dee, and Marie chat about the process behind redesigning the settings pages inside CodePen - how decisions were made, adding helper text to various locations, and designing React components to reuse.
Marie and Dee talk about changes to the settings panel in your account on CodePen - design changes, how changes you make to your settings get saved, making use of feature flags to test, making sure billing is done right, and Stephen's beautiful tables.
Marie and Chris talk about deprecating the blog posting functionality on CodePen, why we decided to turn it off, what happens with posts when the feature sunsets, and suggestions for where to post going forward.
We've got a big update coming for Collections! Stephen and Marie are on to give you a sneak peek at reordering and more of what's coming soon for the Collections feature on CodePen.
Dee, Stephen and Marie talk about CodePen's evolving strategy of releasing mini features and updates rather than waiting for a big, mega update. They also talk about using feature flagging to test new features with specific users, and how to avoid building "the Homer car" with a minimum viable product mentality.
Chris and Marie talk about the creativity in creations they've seen on CodePen, including photo effects, water droplets, live streaming code, and making sheep!
Outages, bugs, and other production nightmares — every startup has them. Dee and Marie are on to talk about what the process is when something goes wrong at CodePen, and tips and tactics for how to deal with a production fire.
Marie and Stephen talk about recent improvements made to CodePen embeds - including Prefill embeds and lazy loading embeds.
Chris and Marie talk about how looking at the numbers behind changes can help guide and improve decisions we make at CodePen, including tools like Redash and Appcues, and how we use data to help sell PRO subscriptions.
Alex joins Marie to talk about how CodePen is using the programming language Go. What is Go? Why does Alex call Go a non-magical language? And what improvements have we made by using Go?
Marie and Chris talk about video tutorials and demos for CodePen, and how CodePen is planning to improve videos across documentation and our YouTube channel.
Dee and Marie talk about changes being made behind the tech we use to send out emails at CodePen. What's the difference between transactional and non-transactional emails? When to bring an outside service vs building it yourself? And how are we sending emails so quickly now?
Team CodePen is dipping our toes into the pool of dynamically generating content using Cloudflare Workers. Alex and Marie are on to talk about what that means, and how we're using it to improve CodePen.
Chris and Marie talk about updating the documentation at CodePen to support WordPress' block editor - also known as Project Gutenberg.
CodePen is using Appcues to help with onboarding and feature notifications in the app. Chris and Marie are on to talk about how it works.
We're shipping some big changes to the PRO asset experience! Marie, Dee, and Stephen are on to talk about what's coming soon to asset hosting, and the tech behind the new features.
It is rubber duck season! As we all spend a lot more time on our own, team CodePen and the CodePen community are squashing bugs with the "rubber ducking" technique for breaking down complex problems. Goofy name, but it really works!
Andrew Brogdon from the Flutter team chats with Marie and Alex about the new Flutter editor on CodePen.
Chris & Marie chat about what's going on in the community in the spring of 2020. A friendly, artistic vibe and a strong community come together to make a tough season a little brighter, and some new features make it even more fun to connect on CodePen.
Show Description Chris, Stephen, and Marie talk about the new editor experience that’s coming soon for Vue.js on CodePen. Time Jumps 02:59 What the Vue? 06:27 🍑 14:32 Sponsor: Jetpack 16:59 Prefill embed Sponsor: Jetpack Jetpack is full of features. If you have had the feeling that you’re paying for more than you need, you’re […]
Marie and Rach welcome Dee Vazquez back to the team! Dee talks about her journey from finance whiz to solo dev to Team CodePen's newest fullstack developer.
Chris, Stephen, and Marie talk about how CodePen has updated the Following feed and the activity feed to make them more fun and useful
Marie, Klare, and Chris talk about the things CodePen has learned about working from home and offer some advice to those who are unexpectedly making the transition to working from home.
Stephen and Chris talk about the various ways CodePen is used in education - both formal and "for fun". Documentation, streaming, code camps, and more!
Show Description Stephen, Marie, and Chris talk about figuring out how to add new keyboard shortcuts to CodePen and the challenges it proposes trying to add features like that to a browser-based app like CodePen. Time Jumps 00:49:09 Shortcuts are hard 08:23:19 Moving between editors 14:30:14 Sponsor: Netlify 16:25:24 Other new commands Sponsor: Netlify Netlify […]
We're two years into the #CodePenChallenge! Chris and Marie chat about why we do them, and the challenges of keeping a community challenge fresh and fun over time.
Klare, Stephen, and Marie talk about recent changes to browsing CodePen and how it makes everything faster and less likely to start a fire on your laptop.
Stephen and Marie talk about the recent update to the assets modal and highlight some of the benefits of the assets you have available to you on CodePen. Just don't say Redux!