CodePen Radio

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....

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 ot...

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...

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...

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...

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 , Twitte...

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...

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 Struth...

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...

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 thi...

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...

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...

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 fasci...

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 collaborative tool that not only helps organize your company's information but helps wi...

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 Kumar, Sara Vieira, Tanner Linsley – these are just a few of the names coming to this year’s Re...

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. Several times that has taken the shape of Web Components. For example, a <shader-art> Web Component...

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 found it fascinating that putting the word "Design Systems" into his book title "...

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 and things like her incredibly clever quizzes (as Pens!). Time Jumps Sponsor: Noti...

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 with Klare here just a few days before her last day to reflect on her years here. Time Jumps

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. Time Jumps Sponsor: Linode Visit linode.com/codepen and see why over a million developers trust Linode for t...

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 skills too, with sites like Frontend Practice . Time Jumps Sponsor: Notion Notion is an amazing collab...

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 <path> commands , which inspired my own shortly after I was properly obsessed with SVG. We talk about all sorts of things like accessibility, how far CSS has come, and some of the amazing stuff that has shipped recently in Safari Tech...

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 this before? Well, that's what Shaw and I get into in this podcast. It's a smidge complicated. The root of it is t...

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 part of the conversation was emphasizing that this work, while almost...

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 ones that clearly took tons of effort, that don't have nearly the hearts they deserve (c'mo...