There was a day not long ago where a Google Chrome browser update left any page with a CodePen Embed on it throwing a whole big pile of red JavaScript errors in the console. Not ideal, obviously. The change was related to how the browser handles allow attributes on iframes (i.e. <iframe allow=”…”>). CodePen was […]

Shaw and Chris are on the show to talk about the thinking and challenges behind upgrading these rather important bits of technology in our stack. We definitely think of React version upgrades and Next.js version upgrades as different things. Sometimes they are prerequisites. The Next.js ones are a bit more important as 1) the docs […]

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, […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]