Category: podcast

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.

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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.

The post 397: User-Generated Content Saftey appeared first on CodePen Blog.

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 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/codepen. Take your first step toward an organized, happier team, today.

The post 370: Alex Trost appeared first on CodePen Blog.

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

The post 365: Klare appeared first on CodePen Blog.

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:

v smol petition for the 'fork' button to open in a new tab (or have the option to) on @CodePen

I'm sometimes uncertain if I've actually forked one of my demos or if I'm just deleting huge chunks of important stuff from the pre-forking pen.@shshaw

— Cassie Evans (@cassiecodes) March 10, 2022

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 that that Fork button isn’t a hyperlink. It’s a button handled by JavaScript because of the nature of how it works (a fork might have data that only the client knows about: unsaved code changes). But Shaw found a way to make it work anyway, by essentially passing the metaKey information through all the forking process until that moment we had an opportunity to open that new tab.

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Sponsor: Notion

Notion is an incredible organizational tool. Individuals can get a ton out of it, but I find the most benefit in making it a home base for teams. It can replace so many separate tools (documents, meeting notes, todos, kanbans, calendars, etc) that it really becomes the hub of doing work, and everything stays far more organized than disparate tools ever could.

The post 361: Forks in a New Tab appeared first on CodePen Blog.

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 him about the creative process, problem-solving, and sharing what you learn.

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Sponsor: Notion

For companies of all sizes, Notion provides one central and customizable workspace that can be tailored to fit any team and bring all teams together to get more done and move faster. Notion is an all-in-one team collaboration tool that combines note-taking, document sharing, wikis, project management, and much more into one space that’s simple, powerful, and beautifully designed. Find out how Notion may be the missing piece your team needs to grow, get more done, and delight everyone who uses it in the process.

The post 348: With Jhey appeared first on CodePen Blog.

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 in a calendar database on Notion, which deals with dates, publication status, sponsors, and all sorts of stuff. And it’s probably one of the least involved Notion setups we have. Much more involved is stuff like project planning and our individual structures for our company-public weeknotes.

Time Jumps

Sponsor: Jetpack Backups

The big news from Jetpack is that all backups are realtime now. Realtime backups are awesome. Anything that happens on your site, it’s backed up immediately. That makes backups extremely useful as there is no risk you have to miss three-quarters of a day of content, purchase, comments or anything else because all you have is daily backups.

The post 347: Using Notion appeared first on CodePen Blog.

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 use if you wish. This idea of taking somewhat practical-looking UI elements, like buttons, loaders, toggles, etc, and then making them do something unexpected and fun is a perfect fit for popularity on CodePen. Last year, Aaron occupied 10 spots in the Top 100! Aaron’s advice: keep challenging yourself.

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Sponsor: Netlify

Netlify is Jamstack hosting with all sorts of features to help make developing sites easier (have you seen Netlify Dev? You can run the whole platform locally) and deployed sites better. But Netlify is a big place! They do all sorts of community things like Jamstack Explorers, a whole learning platform for leveling up your Jamstack skills. Not to mention several YouTube channels loaded with learning and fun.

The post 344: With Aaron Iker appeared first on CodePen Blog.

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, there is no obligation, and no prizes other than the satisfaction of a job well done.

One interesting twist is that Chris used to do a lot of the challenges while Marie was running the podcast, but we just up and switched jobs and we both prefer our new jobs much better (for now!).

Time Jumps

Sponsor: Netlify

Just look at the October 2021 changelog at Netlify. They are always building things and making the features they offer better. We know firsthand how difficult that is to pull off, so hats off! One feature (BETA) that is definitely worth a look is On-Demand Builders. What a great idea for making your builds and deploys fast and efficient.

The post 341: Challenges appeared first on CodePen Blog.

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, chopping those phases into sections (sometimes with their own phases), and a databasing/kanbaning strategy to tie it all together. This also touches GitHub workflows and meeting structures, so there is a lot to think through here and it requires constant effort.

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Sponsor: WordPress.com Growth Summit

The WordPress.com Growth Summit is coming up August 17th (Americas & EMEA) and August 18th (Asia Pacific) and is focused on running a business with a WordPress website as a core.

Get expert advice on how to design your site, write effective copy, attract traffic, build a community, and earn money.

The post #328: Large Scale Planning appeared first on CodePen Blog.

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 better! It’s a big bummer when we have a customer leave when they never reach out at all to get a hand from us on whatever they might need. It leaves us thinking… what else can we do? Can we help you with anything? We’ve been trying a handful of things to get better data and answers to these kind of questions.

And that Call-To-Action: If we can do anything to help you, hit us up.

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Sponsor: WooCommerce + MailPoet = Paid Newsletter Subscriptions!

WooCommerce is the premier eCommerce plugin for WordPress. MailPoet brings a fancy email builder right into WordPress. Combine the two and you get more than power of them individually. For one thing, you get extra powerful eCommerce email abilities — things like abandoned cart emails. Better, you can combine them to make a paid subscription newsletter, but powered by your own site!

The post #324: How can we help you better? appeared first on CodePen Blog.

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: nothing to set up, easy/free to get started, and you can get to the heart of learning quickly. Not to mention the sharing—as a teacher you can provide code as simply as sharing a URL. And of course, all the existing code to be inspired by!

Timestamps

Sponsor: Netlify

Did you see that Netlify bought FeaturePeek and rolled into into all Deploy Previews? They did! It’s cool! Imagine you need to make a change to a website, and need approval from a client first. You can do a Pull Request against the site and your Netlify-hosted site will give you a URL with a Deploy Preview. They’ve done that forever, and it’s incredibly useful. Now, it’s even more useful, as that client can open up a little UI widget on the Deploy Preview and give feedback. They don’t need to know anything about GitHub, yet their feedback can manifest as a GitHub Issue. And that’s just one possible integration.

The post #318: Anna Lytical on What CodePen Is appeared first on CodePen Blog.