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It would be hard to imagine a more full year!

We had 51 meetups happen all around the world

A map of where they all took place:

All meetups are listed on our Meetups Page. And if you want to host one in your city, get in touch!

We released a bunch of features

Some of them were supporting new technologies as they become popular, like Babel and JSX, TypeScript and TSX, and PostCSS.

Some of them were making the editor more useful, like when we made it easy to see how wide it is, gave you a button for cleaning up your code, and massive improvements to how it behaves on mobile.

Some features were centered around allowing you to customize the editor more to your liking, like choosing between tabs and spaces, and turning on and off things like code folding and line numbers.

The Embed Builder got a facelift as well, opening up features like choosing any of our syntax highlighting themes and a preview state to make embeds safer and lighter weight.

PRO members gained the ability to create Private Collections, and we’ve laid some groundwork to make it easier for more things to be able to be private in the future. Speaking of collections, you can turn any Collection into an automatically playing fullscreen experience with CodePen TV.

While it wasn’t exactly a feature light year, it wasn’t packed with feature releases. We did a lot of work behind the scenes with our tech preparing for the future. Things like a massive database move, shuffling servers around and figuring out where/how is best to run which parts of CodePen (like moving stuff to Lambda where we can), and loads of work on our development environment and processes.

Next year should be a bit heavier on features, thanks in part due to the fact that…

We raised a million bucks

Raising money qualifies as PRETTY DARN BIG news. It wasn’t something we planned on from the beginning, but the opportunity came along and we decided it was a good move for us.

The investment means we got to do things things like…

We hired a crack team

We nearly doubled in size, hiring Marie Mosley, Tim Holman, and Jake Albaugh.

You can hear us gush about how amazing they are because…

We recorded and published 39 podcasts

Including episodes where we talk to all the new team members. The general theme of CodePen Radio is what it’s like running a web software business today. A pretty transparent look into all that it takes from a wide variety of angles.

There have been some interesting integrations

Gitter allows embedded Pens in chat, just like Ello does in posts. These type of integrations mostly use oEmbed, our implementation of which goes a lot further because of Embedly. oEmbed works in awesome places like Medium, Discourse, and WordPress.

Modernizr 3 allows you to test out a custom build on CodePen. That’s the POST API in great use, which is also what Google uses to allow you to play with many of their projects, like Material Design Lite and Angular Material. Creative projects also use it, like the UI Thumb Generator.

MaterialUp features Embedded Pens when the design was built here.

You can browse CodePen content with the native Windows app CodePencil. You can search CodePen from the Chrome search bar with the extension CodePen OmniSearch.

People are always trying to bring some of their worflow to CodePen. For example, GhostText allows you to edit a Pen from SublimeText and Resource Finder allows you to find URL’s for resources on Bower.

Envato used CodePen for a number of their challenges.

There was a massive redesign

Working with Sparkbox, we released a major redesign of CodePen just a few months ago. We’re still working with them on more design stuff, as that release was just a part of the ever-evolving betterment of CodePen.

We released some other redesigned bits of CodePen as well, like the revamping of Settings, editor layout changing, and the Embed Builder.

We’re closing in on 6,000,000 Pens

You can keep track on our Stats page. That’s honest to god real, unique, person-created demos. We’ve done a pretty good job of scrubbing the database and keeping spam out of it.

From the beginning of CodePen until this March we had 3 million, so the rate of creation is really going up!

To next year!

We’ve already got some pretty awesome releases planned for all throughout the year. Things that will make CodePen more powerful, more fun, more useful, better for groups, better for education, and better for the employment dance.

We even have one more employee joining us! Here’s a not-so-subtle hint:

To a great new year!