CodePen Radio

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

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

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

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

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