Have you seen The Grug Brained Developer? It’s an essay with a URL. It’s written like a caveman became a developer and put together a philosophy that is largely a rally against complexity. Cavemen have dumb simple brains, get it? It has good points, and I largely agree with it. The caveman angle is a clever quirk to get to read it and to stick in o…

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 wh…

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 of interesting creative technologies. Time Jumps…

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 than you ever thought it would. Ryan has a knack for feelin…

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 can learn a lot from asking that database questions, and we even have fancy charts that express in…

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 about chopping the project into phases, chopp…

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, but next year we're shooting for 5-nines, that is, 99.999% uptime, where w…

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 as far as composing components in a way that makes the…

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 also means that we have some space to do be…

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 out hearts in general on CodePen is a great idea a…

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 UI and UX. This release brings that experience in line with current…

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 to have on the show to talk about it. Why CodePen Radio t…

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 podca…

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 Anna, the appeal of CodePen is in the simplicity:…

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 sites she makes are in Eleventy, …

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 David Desandro's Zdog (David also worked on the Code…

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 support doesn't have to be this static thing that just is the way…

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 self-manage themselves in a way they never could before,…

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 they've made …

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, what to lede with, and how to cover all the most …

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. It's…

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 into more of the repercussions of the monorepo from a f…

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 be useful for all sorts of ot…

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 user who wanted to know what the advantag…

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 thought it might be helpful for you, potential hires out there, to hear about h…

(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 View to the very useful for testing Debug V…