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 […]

Nothing is above a little healthy criticism. Here’s Den Odell’s article We Keep Reinventing CSS, but Styling Was Never the Problem. It’s easy to forget what CSS was originally designed for: documents. You’d write some HTML, style a few headings and paragraphs, maybe float an image to the left, and call it a day. In […]

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 […]

My daughter had a little phase of being into Word Searches. I found it to be a cool dad moment when I was like “I’ll make you a tool to make them!”. That’s what she was into. She liked doing them OK, but she really liked the idea of making them. So my tool starts […]

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 […]

Adam Argyle is clear with some 2025 CSS advice: I think every front-end developer should know how to enable page transitions, transition a <dialog>, popover, and <details>, animate light n’ dark gradient text, type safe their CSS system, and add springy easing to animation. Nobody asked me, but if I had to pick a favorite of Adam’s six, it’s all the stuff about animating […]

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. […]

I found myself saying “The Edge” in a recent podcast with Stephen. I was talking about some server-side JavaScript that executes during a web request, and that it was advantageous that it happens at CDN nodes around the world rather than at one location only, so that it’s fast. That was kinda the whole point […]

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 […]

There’s a nice article by Enzo Manuel Mangano called Checkbox Interactions – The beauty of Layout Animations. In the end, you get some nicely animated checkboxes, essentially: I like it. It’s a modern-looking multiple-choice with very clear UX. Enzo’s tutorial is all React Native-ified. I think Enzo is a React Native guy and that’s his […]