CodePen Radio

Епизоде

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  437: The Cheese. It Has Been Moved. 18.08.2026

  Stephen and Chris hop on to talk about the couple of weeks post 2.0 launch. Things are certainly different in 2.0! Literally the location of certain buttons is in a new place, and that requires folks to poke around a bit and figure it out. Some people just do that and it's a non-issue. Some write in for help and even find delight in the new features. Some lash out. The cheese metaphor is from an old book by Spencer Johnson about people experiencing change in the workplace and learning to deal with it. You might call it a bit heavy handed, and the metaphor was plucked away by UX folks to describe interface changes, so consider this the end of the line for this already-stretched metaphor. That didn't stop us from using the icon in our documentation about this though. Sponsor: Notion With the recent launch of Custom Agents, Notion became the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side. And now, their new Developer Platform is turning that workspace into infrastructure developers can build on. Time Jumps
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  436: The Design & Message of Launch Emails (with MJML) 28.07.2026

  Just one week off our big 2.0 launch, Shaw and Chris hop on to talk about how email is actually a big part of the launch. Social media ain't what it used to be, and not everybody is on your app every single day waiting for a notification. Sponsor: Notion With the recent launch of Custom Agents, Notion became the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side. And now, their new Developer Platform is turning that workspace into infrastructure developers can build on. Time Jumps
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  435: The 2.0 Launch & Team CodePen’s Favorite Features 23.07.2026

  The whole team is here! That's a first for us. Today we're launching 2.0, so we're having a little fun in this episode picking out our favorite features. Time Jumps Links Plus a bonus appearance here of Marie's victory graphic.
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  434: Still Proudly on WordPress for our Blog, Podcast, and Documentation 15.07.2026

  Marie and Chris hop on CodePen Radio for a little chat on how we're still happily using WordPress for a variety of things here on CodePen. We've got it hosted on a subdomain and on a different (WordPress-specific) hosting plan than our main monorepo, so it has its own deployment process and such. We use WordPress for our blog, where this very podcast is published, because WordPress handles RSS well, and a podcast is an RSS feed with an audio file. We also, quite importantly, use it for our docs. For 2.0, we re-wrote the docs and used a Custom Post Type in WordPress to organize them, which feels much more organized. Time Jumps Links
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  433: CodePen 2.0 is Backward Compatible with Any Classic Pen or Project 07.07.2026

  When we set out to build the 2.0 editor, another editor in the CodePen cannon, the goal was actually to reduce the number of editors we have and support. Ideally, reduce it to one. The trick is that anything an existing Pen or Project can do, this new editor needs to be able to do as well. All while making sure it's forever future extensible. That was the wild engineering task in front of us, and we're happy to report it's done. To be clear, at the time of publishing: all Projects have been converted to 2.0 Pens, so Projects doesn't even exist anymore. Someday we'll convert Pens too, but not particularly soon. Instead, you can choose to convert Classic Pens (with a button click under the Save menu) if you want to. Sponsor: Notion With the recent launch of Custom Agents, Notion became the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side. And now, their new Developer Platform is turning that workspace into infrastructure developers can build on. Time Jumps
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  432: Trends of 2026 (So Far) 03.07.2026

  Marie has her eye on what seems to be super popular with CodePen users so far this year. Galleries (in different directions) https://codepen.io/thebabydino/pen/dPXVyqN https://codepen.io/luis-lessrain/pen/ZYpyoRV https://codepen.io/Nidal95/pen/qENQPBp https://codepen.io/ol-ivier/pen/emdjmBQ https://codepen.io/cbolson/pen/MYebgqj Custom Select https://codepen.io/editor/cbolson/pen/019cbfe5-85da-7d31-a7de-44b6b35e7c1c https://codepen.io/t_afif/pen/PwGPJOB shape(), border-shape, corner-shape https://codepen.io/una/pen/ogzRBWV https://codepen.io/una/pen/bNeLmoZ https://codepen.io/donotfold/pen/vEXvxjb scroll-timeline, animation-timeline https://codepen.io/danielhaim/pen/azmBEPL https://codepen.io/t_afif/pen/JoKYwXO CSS Functions https://frontendmasters.com/blog/the-fundamentals-and-dev-experience-of-css-function/ Sponsor: Notion With the recent launch of Custom Agents, Notion became the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side. And now, their new Developer Platform is turning that workspace into infrastructure developers can build on. Time Jumps
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  431: Versions are Deeply Integrated into CodePen 30.06.2026

  Rachel and Chris on the podcast this week discussion the (ahem, rather large news) that every CodePen 2.0 Pen is versioned. That's right, you can jump back in time to previous versions at any time in case mistakes were made. You can take a look at the preview and code of past versions in case you just need to reference something. It all works extremely fast and efficiently. We get into the why and how it all works. Time Jumps
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  430: The Wild World of Keyboard Shortcuts in Web Apps 24.06.2026

  Shaw and Chris talk about how the keyboard shortcut situation is challenging, but in the best shape it's ever been in for our 2.0 editor. Between the operating system, browser, CodeMirror, and Emmet, the space is fairly crowded, but we've got enough room to offer lots of useful stuff. The commands are more findable than ever with our new Command system and the Omnibar. Time Jumps
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  429: Why CodePen Rebuilt Its Realtime Service 16.06.2026

  We've had realtime features on CodePen for ages. Back when it was pretty damn hard. Our Collab Mode is an obvious one, where users can code together. (This "just works" in the 2.0 editor, it's not called anything special.) That and Professor Mode used to have realtime chat (until we pulled it because very few people used it). We went through iterations of this including our own implementations and using services like PubNub. Code collaboration in realtime is particularly difficult. We used FirePad/FireBase for a while for this, and honestly that was a nice abstraction. Increasing the difficulty though, we need to layer on additional needs like syncing settings, presence, and just arbitrary message delivery (e.g. "a new build is ready!"). We used Ably for much of this for quite a while. These days, our whole realtime system integrates with our caching layer, goes over the network using standard web sockets to our beefy Go servers, and is integrated with CRDTs/Y.js to keep everybody looking at the same thing. Plenty of open source software at work, but no more third-party services. This means lower operating costs and a simpler architecture. The cost is that problems are, well, our problems. Time Jumps
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  428: Improving The Entire Billing System (is Very Worth It) 09.06.2026

  Rachel and Chris on the show this week to discuss a series of big changes over the last, say, six months or so with our billing system. We've essentially re-written this thing several times, and obviously this is the best time. Having three plans, two payment providers, teams, and fifteen years of history is a lot to manage. An important aspect of the journey was getting the billing information into a single table in our database, and relying more on dynamic calls out to the payment providers when needed rather than trying to keep too much data in sync. Of course we wanted to clean up the codebase and get payment APIs ported over to our latest system, but the biggest need this was all satisfying was UX. We wanted a proper pricing page, better pages for people to manage their billing, and really easy upgrade modals inside our 2.0 editor. The good news is, it all worked. Time Jumps
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  427: Next.js and The Journey of SSR 02.06.2026

  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 <div id="app">. 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 <meta> 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
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  426: Browserslist in CodePen 2.0 27.05.2026

  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. Sponsor: Notion With the recent launch of Custom Agents, Notion became the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side. And now, their new Developer Platform is turning that workspace into infrastructure developers can build on. Jump Links
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  425: Help Your Users Help You with Debug Logs 12.05.2026

  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
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  424: File List Optimization 29.04.2026

  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
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  423: 2.0 Templates 22.04.2026

  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
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  422: Supporting Packages 14.04.2026

  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 <script type="importmap"> 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
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  421: View Control of the 2.0 Editor 08.04.2026

  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
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  420: What are Blocks? 11.03.2026

  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
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  419: Why 2.0? 05.03.2026

  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
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  418: CodeMirror 6 21.02.2026

  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