CodePen Radio
The CodePen team talk about the ins and outs of running a web software business.
Episodes
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 no...
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...
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
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 everythin...
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 ...
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 e...
Chris and Stephen talk about how we use a Cloudflare Worker & HTMLRewriter to inject a very special <script> 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 <script> 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 <script> point t...
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.)
...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
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 ...
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,...
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 shoul...
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...
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 pod...
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...
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