CodePen Radio

Having that first response from the server to users browsers be, ya know, full of good, useful, renderable HTML is certainly better than an empty . You can feel it and see it in the filmstrip view of the site loading. Not to mention you need it for at least things like tags if you want your URLs to "unfurl" properly on social sites. Stephen and Chris jump on the podcast to discuss this journey for us as it relates to Next.js. We got it "for free" for our Ruby on Rails pages, but as we're slowly changing frameworks over the years, we've got new challenges, and some gray-hair inducing bugs. We started on Next.js' "page router" and made changes to our Apollo Cache setup to support SSR. Then, over time, moved to the "app router" and did lots more work getting ready getting the most complex page on our site, the 2.0 editor, completely SSRd. That meant getting rid of using things like localStorage for anything view related and fighting bugs related to React somehow mounting itself to the wrong root. Time Jumps

Stephen and Chris chat about how the 2.0 editor (well, the compiler really) understands and supports Browserslist, a config format that lives in your package.json file that multiple blocks can understand and make browser support decisions against. Jump Links

As we're getting close to rounding out the Beta period of the 2.0 editor, we're trying to close out any bugs we find or users report quickly. They could be browser-support related, network conditions related, account capability related, or just bugs in how the 2.0 editor and technology behind it works. It's complicated enough that the best way to debug things is to see exactly what the user sees when they have trouble. A very cool side effect to having built the 2.0 editor with Apollo is that we have a nearly complete look at what is happening in the editor by virtue of the Apollo Cache (we talked about what that is here). We built a tool that can export that as JSON data, and we can load it locally to see exactly what the user sees. It's a bit fancier than that, doing things like saving browser console error logs and stuff, but that's the gist of it. Time Jumps

The 2.0 Editor can support hundreds of files per Pen, not to mention folders mixed in which don't count toward that total. This can be pretty weighty on the DOM and thus adversely affect performance. Especially as each file/folder has children, a variety of event listeners, are drag and drop enabled, etc. "Virtualizing" data like this is a common approach, but we've found if we just use IntersectionObserver to see if they are visible or not, "freeze" them if they aren't, and fade them in and out of life, it's a great solution. Time Jumps

Stephen and Chris hop on the ol' podcast to talk about all the ways that Templates are way better in 2.0 land. You've always been able to make your own templates, but now you can select one even after you've arrived in the editor. There is a new place (the create page) which features bookmarked and official templates (as well as your own). Most importantly, there is a way to set a "default template" now, meaning all new Pens will start with the same setup as the Pen you pick as that. Time Jumps

Alex and Chris talk about how the 2.0 Editor supports packages from npm. The trick is both simple and complex. The idea is simple. We detect the packages you want to use, list them in an (editable) package.json file, then turn that into a in your HTML files that import those packages from esm.sh. Complex in that, well, all those steps are fairly difficult to get right, handle all edge cases, and do extremely quickly. All of which the CodePen Compiler does. Time Jumps

Stephen & Chris look at the UI of the 2.0 Editor and show all the control you have over what you're looking at. Way more control than the Classic editor! We share some of the thinking behind it. Don't miss the Omnibar! Time Jumps Links Circle Round Story Pirates Podcast Who Moved My Cheese? The freeCodeCamp Podcast

With CodePen 2.0, we've got a new word we're using: Blocks. A way to think about Blocks is anything that processes code. They are added as steps to the CodePen Compiler as needed. For example, TypeScript is a block, because it processes files in the TypeScript syntax into JavaScript files. But something like Lodash is not a block. Lodash is a package from npm (which we also handle, but that's a topic for another podcast). Lodash doesn't process code, it's just a library that is linked up or bundled. Time Jumps

CodePen 2.0 was the most ambitious project that we've ever taken on in our lives. Why would we do such a thing? Chris and Alex explain the thinking behind it. We've been around a long time, know what our customers want, and are developers ourselves, so we know how this industry moves. We thought we could serve both in a powerful and flexible way, taking us into the future. Time Jumps

Chris Coyier and Stephen Shaw discuss the transition from CodeMirror 5 to CodeMirror 6, highlighting the significant improvements in accessibility, performance, and user experience. They delve into architectural changes, integration with modern JavaScript frameworks such as Next.js, and the new theming options available in the editor. Time Jumps

There was a day not long ago where a Google Chrome browser update left any page with a CodePen Embed on it throwing a whole big pile of red JavaScript errors in the console. Not ideal, obviously. The change was related to how the browser handles allow attributes on iframes (i.e. ). CodePen was calculating the appropriate values inside an iframe for a nested iframe. That must have been a security issue of sorts, as now those values need to be present on the outside iframe as well. We documented all this in a blog post so hopefully we could get some attention from Chrome on this, and for other browser makers as well since it affects all of us. And I posted it on the ol' social media: Huge thanks to Bramus Van Damme who saw this, triaged it at Chrome, and had a resolution within a day: I think the patch is a great change so hats off to everyone involved for getting it done so quickly. It's already in Canary and don't really know when it'll get the stable but that sure will be good. It follows how Safari is doing things where values that aren't understood are just ignored (which we think is fine and inline with how HTML normally works). Fortunately we were able to mitigate the problem a little until then. For most Embedded Pens, a is loaded on the page embedding it, and we dynamically create the for you. This is just nice as it makes making an accessible fallback easier and gives you access to API-ish features for the embeds. We were able to augment that script to do a little browser user-agent sniffing and apply the correct set of allow attributes on the iframe, as to avoid those JavaScript errors we were seeing. But there's the rub: we'd rather not do any user-agent sniffing at all. If we could just put all the possible allow attributes we want on there, and not be terribly concerned if any particular browser didn't support any particular value, that would be ideal. We just can't have the scary console errors, out of concern for our users who may not understand them. Where we're at in the saga now is that: We're waiting for the change to Chrome to get to stable. We're hoping Safari stays the way it is. OH HI FIREFOX. On that last point, if we put all the allow attributes we would want to on an in Firefox, we also get console-bombed. This time not with red-e

Shaw and Chris are on the show to talk about the thinking and challenges behind upgrading these rather important bits of technology in our stack. We definitely think of React version upgrades and Next.js version upgrades as different things. Sometimes they are prerequisites. The Next.js ones are a bit more important as 1) the docs for the most recent version tend to be the best and 2) it involves server side code which is important for security reasons. Never has any of it been trivially easy. Time Jumps

Robert and Chris hop on the show to talk about choices we've had to make around Babel. Probably the best way to use Babel is to just use the @babel/preset-env plugin so you get modern JavaScript features processed down to a level of browser support you find comfortable. But Babel supports all sorts of plugins, and in our Classic Editor, all you do is select "Babel" from a dropdown menu and that's it. You don't see the config nor can you change it, and that config we use does not use preset env. So we're in an interesting position with the 2.0 editor. We want to give new Pens, which do support editable configs, a good modern config, and we want all converted Classic Pens a config that doesn't break anything. There is some ultra-old cruft in that old config, and supporting all of it felt kinda silly. We could support a "legacy" Babel block that does support all of it, but so far, we've decided to just provide a config that handles the vast majority of old stuff, while using the same Babel block that everyone will get on day one. We're still in the midst of working on our conversion code an verifying the output of loads of Classic Pens, so we'll see how it goes! Time Jumps

Rachel and Chris jump on the show to talk about a bit of client-side technology we use: Apollo. We use it because we have a GraphQL API and Apollo helps us write queries and mutations that go through that API. It slots in quite nicely with our React front-end, providing hooks we use to do the data work we need to do when we need to do it. Plus we get typed data all the way through. Chris gets to learn that the Apollo Cache isn't some bonus feature that just helps makes things faster, but an inevitable and deeply integrated feature into how this whole thing works. Time Jumps

We're over 13 years old as a company now. We decide that we're not a startup anymore (we're a "small business" with big dreams) but we are still indie. We've seen trends come and go. We just do what we do, knowing the tradeoffs, and plan to keep getting better as long as we can. Links Timeline – Chris Coyier 115: Adam Argyle on Cracking the 2025 Web Dev Interview | Front-End Fire Time Jumps

Or just "Embeds" as we more frequently refer to them as. Stephen and Chris talk about the fairly meaty project which was re-writing our Embeds for a CodePen 2.0 world. No longer can we assume Pens are just one HTML, CSS, and JavaScript "file", so they needed a bit of a redesign, but doing as little as possible so that existing Embed Themes still work. This was plenty tricky as it was a re-write from Rails to Next.js, with everything needing to be Server-Side Rendered and as lightweight as possible (thank urql!). Time Jumps

Alex and Chris hop on the show to talk about a bit of technology that Alex calls "The 2nd best technological choice he's ever made." That technology is called Tree-sitter. It's a code parsing tool for building ASTs (Abstract Syntax Trees) out of code. GitHub uses it to power search and "go to" functionality. The creators now work on Zen, where a code parser is paramount. We use it to understand an entire Pen very quickly so we can understand how it all links together (among other things) and make a plan for how to process the Pen (a "build plan"). It's fast, accurate, forgiving, and extensible. Just a heck of a learning curve. Jump Links

Chris & Marie jump on the podcast to talk about just how drastically customer support has changed over the last few years. We still exclusively do customer support over email. Incoming email from real customers who need a hand with something where they type out that email in plain languages themselves are few and far between. Instead we get an onslaught of noise from users that don't exist about Pens and situations that don't exist. The influence of agentic AI is massive here, some of it with nefarious intent and some not. All of it needs work to mitigate. Time Jumps

Chris and Stephen talk about how we use a Cloudflare Worker & HTMLRewriter to inject a very special tag into the previews of the Pens you work on. This script has a lot of important jobs so it's presence is crucial, and getting it in there reliably can is a bit of a challenge. Time Jumps

Chris and Stephen hop on the podcast to discuss the concept of a proxy. Possibly the most "gray hat" thing that CodePen does. We use a third-party analytics tool called Fullres. We could just put a link to the necessary to make that work directly to fullres.com, but being an analytics tool, it's blocked by a ton of ad blocking browsers and browser extensions. We made the conscious choice to have that point to a codepen.io URL instead (a proxy) so that we get (much) more accurate usage data on the app. Since there is nothing tracked that is an anonymity concern, and we do nothing with the data other than help inform ourselves on how to make a better app, we wear this gray hat. If you'd still like to block these requests, the path would be https://codepen.io/stats/fr/* Time Jumps

Robert and Chris jump on to talk about our little CDN project. Maybe that's not the right term, but we struggled with naming it. Truth be told, it's the /public/ folder in our monorepo, where the purpose is getting files to the world wide internet at URLs that anyone can access. Our favicon is a good example, where many of our sites need access to that, but we only want it once in our repo (but we have actually lots of use-cases.) There are several complications along the way. One is that we need to fingerprint these files so we can cache-bust them when needed. We also need to be able to import the URLs in other parts of the repo, so we need manifest files that contain those URLs in multiple formats. Plus many of the files have their own build process, they aren't just entirely static files. In the end, building our own thing was probably the right move. The files go to Cloudflare R2, which, I suppose, is the CDN part. Time Jumps

Marie and Chris jump on to discuss some of the trends of what people are building on CodePen here, approximately halfway through 2025. New CSS! Custom @functions (just landed) if() function clip-path & shape() corner-shape and the superellipse Scrolling stuff The attr() power up Hot Styles Liquid glass (Jhey's demo, Spark) Hard glitch (CRT-like effect with VFX-JS, Glitchy button hover effect with VFX-JS, ❍ Cinematic Glitch Slideshow) Holographics (CSS Holographic Masks) Grainy textures (Grainy distorted interactive 1 gradient blobs) Innovative blurs (wavy wobbly lava orb, Bubbles Background Animation) New color spaces (OKLCH Swatch Example, CSS Color Functions, CSS oklch Gradation) Hot Pens Petr Knoll’s Glass Button (From February, well ahead of liquid glass) Mike Bespalov’s Monospace ASCII art generator (known to be “vibe coded”) Adam Kuhn’s Severance Lumon Macrodata Refinement Steve Gardner’s “Who Needs Shaders” Time Jumps

Alex & Chris get into a fairly recent technological change at CodePen where we ditched our Elasticsearch implementation for just using our own Postgres database for search. Sometimes choices like this are more about team expertise, dev environment practicalities, and complexity tradeoffs. We found this change to be much better for us, which matters! For the most part search is better and faster. Postgres is not nearly as fancy and capable as Elasticsearch, but we werent taking advantage of what Elasticsearch had to offer anyway. For the power users out there: it's true that we've lost the ability to do in-code search for now. But it's temporary and will be coming back in time. Time Jumps

Stephen and Chris hop on to talk about how we're saving everyone from crashed browser tabs in CodePen's 2.0 editor. One simple: Executing JavaScript can cause a browser tab to entirely lock up, preventing you from doing anything, like potentially saving your work. It can even crash other same-domain tabs. But not on our watch! CodePen is now using a "heartbeat" technique to report up from the preview iframe to the parent page, and if we don't hear the heartbeat, we can rip out the iframe and stop the crash. But it was very tricky to get working and not too jumpy. Fortunately, we got it all working, because our previous technique of instrumenting your JavaScript wasn't going to scale well to the 2.0 editor. Time Jumps

Chris & Rachel hop on the show to talk about the expanded privacy (access) model in the 2.0 editor (in Private Beta as we speak). Private Pens have always been a big deal, but as private as they are, if someone has the URL, they have the URL, and it doesn't always feel very private. There are two new levels of privacy in the 2.0 editor: password protected and collaborators only. Passwords are an obvious choice we probably should have done long ago. With it, both the Pen in the editor itself, as well as the potentially deployed site are password protected. Our new permissions model is intertwined in this. Now you can invite others directly to be a fellow Editor or simply a Viewer to an otherwise private Pen. If you set the privacy level to "collaborators only", that's the most private a Pen can possibly be. Time Jumps

Pins are dead! Long live bookmarks! Pins was never a good name for the feature we have on CodePen where you can mark a Pen or Collection to more quickly jump back to it from anywhere on the site. The word is too similar to "Pen" that it's just awkward, not to mention it's not exactly and obvious metaphor. A bookmark is a much more clear term and icon, so we decided to switch to it. Switching the UI is kind of the easy part. It's kind of a cultural thing at CodePen, but when we make a change like this, we change it 100% through the entire code base, down to the database itself. In order to do that, we had to chunk it into stages so that those stages can roll out independently, but in order, to make it seamless. Now that it's done, we were able to extend the functionality of Bookmarks a bit, such that bookmarking a template is extra useful. One place to see that is on the new Create page. As an extra bit of history, the idea for Bookmarks came from Katie Kovalcin when we worked with Sparkbox for a redesign ages ago, then Klare Frake took the idea home. Time Jumps

Hi! We're back! Weird right? It's been over 2 years.  We took a break after episode 400, not because we ran out of things to talk about, but because we were so focused on our CodePen 2.0 work, it got old not being able to discuss it yet. We'll be talking plenty about that going forward. But CodePen has a ton of moving parts, so we'll be talking about all of it.  This week we'll be kicking off the podcast again talking about a huge and vital bit of CodePen infastructure: our email system. Outgoing email, that is. We get plenty of incoming email from y'all as well, but this is about the app itself sending email.  Timeline Links

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 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 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 parse it out into needs to match those types perfectly, or else it panics. We had found that our Go code was working around this in all sorts of ways that felt sloppy and inconsistent. 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 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 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 <a href="https://srv.

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 Jumps Sponsor: Notion Notion 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 Jumps Sponsor: Notion Notion 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 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 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 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) 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 Jumps Sponsor: Notion Notion 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. Time Jumps

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

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 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.

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. 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 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. Time Jumps

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. Time Jumps 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 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: Notion Notion 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. Show Links: Riccardo Zanutta’s “Animations & Cool Effects”: https://codepen.io/collection/XgZLNA (started in 2014!)AndyMan’s “Patterns, filled space”: https://codepen.io/collection/XBLxoeEric Karkovack’s “ASCII Artwork”: https://codepen.io/collection/MgaYzZJhey Tompkins’ “Speedy CSS Tips”: https://codepen.io/collection/bNWWdOPeter Norton’s “3D CSS”: https://codepen.io/collection/GoZQxGBramus’ “Scroll Linked Animations”: https://codepen.io/collection/xKzjpo

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: Deleting is super fast, it's just manipulating a single value.It opens the door for un-deleting things that perhaps were mistakenly deleted. This approach can be slightly more work. You'll need to offer a way to truly wipe data completely for users. You'll probably want a reaper to clean up data that has been deleted long enough. You'll need to comply with regulations about data deletion. You might have to build un-deletion features. You might need to be doing that filtering yourself throughout the app. It's work, but it's generally worth it. In our case, because we soft delete everything on CodePen now, the Deleted Items area of Your Work now works for all Item Types (Pens, Collections, and Projects). Before, it only worked for Pens, and even there it was a little messy as it didn't retain the URL slug or comments and such — now it does. Time Jumps Sponsor: Memberful Memberful is a best-in-class membership software used by the web's biggest creators. If you're building a membership website for a client, Memberful handles the hard stuff so you can complete your builds quickly and your clients can focus on creating content while earning revenue with ease. It seamlessly integrates with popular tools like WordPress, Mailchimp, and Discord, so they can reach and monetize their existing audience. Memberful maintains GraphQL API, webhooks, and OAuth Single Sign on to make integration even easier. Help your client monetize their passion. Get started for free at Memberful.com

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, making them all the easier to manage. Shout out to our user with many thousands of assets which helped provide the motivation to get this out. Time Jumps Sponsor: Memberful Memberful is a best-in-class membership software used by the web's biggest creators. If you're building a membership website for a client, Memberful handles the hard stuff so you can complete your builds quickly and your clients can focus on creating content while earning revenue with ease. It seamlessly integrates with popular tools like WordPress, Mailchimp, and Discord, so they can reach and monetize their existing audience. Memberful maintains GraphQL API, webhooks, and OAuth Single Sign on to make integration even easier. Help your client monetize their passion. Get started for free at Memberful.com

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 on just JavaScript this time. We'll look at the top 10 in terms of usage over time. Time Jumps Sponsor: Whiskey Web and Whatnot Whiskey Web and Whatnot is different than your typical dev podcast. We show a lighter, more human side of developers you know and love, like a fireside chat with your favorite devs. Past guests include Tom Preston-Werner, Kent C. Dodds, Charlie Gerard, Wes Bos, and the incomparable Chris Coyier! We have discussed everything from Next.js and TypeScript to Chuck’s past life as a blackjack dealer, favorite power tools, the best casseroles, and of course whiskey!

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 stuff so you and your clients can focus on what you do best, while earning revenue quickly. Memberful seamlessly integrates with the tools you already use, like WordPress, Mailchimp, Discord, and lots more. With Memberful, you have full control and ownership of all things related to your brand, your audience, and your finances. Learn more at Memberful.com and get started for free — no credit card required.

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 valueLow 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 are still helpful. This is the answer to the build vs buy conundrum. It's a buy for everything in between. 9️⃣ Chris: The Co-Founder Relationship is at the heart of the business Every relationship between people at a company is important, but the relationship between the founders is crucial. It sets the culture and makes everything work. The company cannot continue with a broken relationship at the founder level. They say it is like marriage, and that analogy isn't far off. Chances are, you’re going to find out you are very different people who think and feel differently about all sorts of things. You need to get along, you need to respect each other, you need to trust each other, but you can’t avoid hard conversations (as much as I would like to). 8️⃣ Alex: Build Minimalist Tech Do more with less. Just because you didn't write it doesn't mean it's less complex. Just because you did write it doesn't mean it's less complex. You might have to add technology in the short term as you're migrating to what will end up with more minimal tech. It is a focusing of you and your team's expertise. 7️⃣ Chris: You're probably undercharging people You’re probably undercharging people for your software product. Software is always difficult to build and maintain. It's likely your intuition leads you toward lower prices, but every experience we've ever had with higher prices (and raising prices) has been positive. Fewer people than you think will care, revenue goes up, and your time is better compensated. Plus, there is a weird correlation between your high-paying customers being chill and low-paying customers being more challenging. 6️⃣ Alex: One thing at a time <p class=

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 taking some of those ideas and scaling them, like he's doing with Turn, Mock, and Listening Party. We got a chance to talk about a handful of Lee's favorite Pens, but there are more in the Collection he made. Time Jumps Sponsor: Whiskey Web and Whatnot Whiskey Web and Whatnot is different than your typical dev podcast. We show a lighter, more human side of developers you know and love, like a fireside chat with your favorite devs. Past guests include Tom Preston-Werner, Kent C. Dodds, Charlie Gerard, Wes Bos, and the incomparable Chris Coyier! We have discussed everything from Next.js and TypeScript to Chuck’s past life as a blackjack dealer, favorite power tools, the best casseroles, and of course whiskey!