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 Jumps Sponsor: Split This podcast is powered by Split . The Feature Management & Experimentation Platform that reimagine...
Feb 08, 20230
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 <select> element in the DOM. This problem never surfaced because our Rails app just papered over it. But we're moving our code to Go in when you parse JSON in Go, the struct type that you pars...
Feb 01, 20230
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 produc...
Jan 26, 20230
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 trea...
Jan 18, 2023•33 min
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 Jumps Sponsor: Split This podcast is po...
Jan 11, 20230
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 year, just 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 ...
Jan 04, 20230
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 betwe...
Dec 14, 20220
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 Jumps Sponsor: Split This 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 i...
Dec 07, 20220
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,...
Nov 30, 20220
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. Time Jumps
Nov 23, 20220
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? Time Jumps
Nov 16, 20220
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 to...
Nov 02, 20220
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...
Oct 19, 20220
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. Time Jumps
Oct 05, 20220
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 mad...
Sep 28, 20220
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...
Sep 14, 20220
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 this magnitude. We have some interesting failsafe procedures in place. Plus we get into some of the analytic numbers behind what we're doing. Here's to another upcoming many hundred more! Time Jumps Sponsor: Noti...
Sep 07, 20220
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 non-null value will be filtered out. This is the concept of "soft" delete. It's not really gone from the database, it just behaves like it is. This has two clear benefits: De...
Aug 31, 20220
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 allow you upload many at a time. But while we had Bulk Upload, as it were, we didn't offer any other "bulk" actions, until now. Stephen and I talk about how we added more bulk actions for assets, m...
Aug 24, 20220
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 add in the HTML by hand, Projects, imports, or otherwise) because we have them in a special database table — good for exactly this kind of data analysis! We're also focusing...
Aug 17, 20220
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 post-CodePen. Time Jumps Sponsor: Memberful Memberful is easy to use, best-in-class membership software for independent creators, publishers, podcasters, educators, and more. We take care of the hard stu...
Aug 10, 20220
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 do things that are either: High time, high value Low time, low value As in, they take a long time but are going to make a big difference. Or they won't take too long, don't ask too much of you, but a...
Aug 03, 20220
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 example, or Using Three.js to Hear the Dawn with Jack White . Keep up with Lee on Instagram , Twitter , or his personal site . He's overflowing with ideas, not just doing all the freelancing but takin...
Jul 27, 20220
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 form of industry payback. We didn't get to talk about as many of them as I would have liked, but Jase graciously made a Collection of some of his favorites . Quite a few ex...
Jul 20, 20220
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 web can do that?" kind of feeling. Check out: personal website , collaboration with Eliza Struthers-Jobin , shaders tutorial video with Alex Trost , NFTs . Time Jumps Sponsor: Memberful Memberful is easy...
Jul 13, 20220
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 for animation. We get into all that, some of Craig's own favorite Pens , and some of Craig's other professional history on the show. Time Jumps Sponsor: Notion Notion is an ama...
Jul 06, 20220
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 joy to talk to. We took the opportunity to nerd out on a variety of mostly CSS-related things. Time Jumps...
Jul 01, 20220
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 write on CodePen. A tiny example is removing the autofocus attribute when a Pen in shown in a grid view <iframe>. A more significant example is that we need to inject some of our own JavaScript int...
Jun 22, 20220
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 really wonderfully creative Pens using Three.js and p5.js. Neon-on-dark is a fresh look. We get into those and more, a bit sneakily as we can take an internal look at what th...
Jun 15, 20220
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 wrote when I ran CSS-Tricks). We got to chat about some of his iconic Pens, his work, and some past fascinations like Tweet-sized code experiments. Follow him on Twitter here . Time Jumps...
Jun 08, 20220
