CodePen Radio
The CodePen team talk about the ins and outs of running a web software business.
Episodes
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
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 ...
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 iss...
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 mal...
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-sourc...
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 Liqui...
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 ...
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 M...
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 lit...
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.
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 combinatio...
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...
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 sho...
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 ...
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...
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 data...
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. St...
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 —...
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