CodePen Radio

Aysenur Turk had a number of appearances on this year's Top Hearted of 2021, including #1! In this podcast, I get to catch up with her, find out where she gets ideas and inspiration, how much time it takes to build something like her amazing layouts, and what her favorites are.

Custom dashboards, admin panels, CRUD apps—build any internal tool faster in Retool. Visually design apps that interface with any database or API. Switch to code nearly anywhere to customize how your apps look and work. With Retool, you ship more apps and move your business forward—all in less time.

Thousands of teams at companies like Amazon, DoorDash, Peloton, and Brex collaborate around custom-built Retool apps to solve internal workflows. To learn more, visit retool.com.

As you read this, CodePen is 100% on PostgreSQL for our main relational database. It was a transition that took a couple weeks of pretty intense effort, and lots of planning and prep before that. I've got Alex on the show to talk about it, as he was the main instigator and led the effort, but everyone contributed in some way.

Wondering why? Well...

• We were on a pretty old version of MySQL (5.6), and upgrading to something more modern (like 8) would have required just as much effort, so we thought we'd move on to something we saw more value in.
• We're undertaking big new efforts that require a bunch of data specific work. It'll be more work to change after that, so it felt like a now or never situation.
• PostgreSQL means consolidating of technology, which is big for our small team. We've done some of this, and it opens the door for more. For example, we can stop using Elasticsearch as a totally separate database for search and lean on PostgreSQL. The same goes for an analytics-focused database, job queuing, and even potentially static asset hosting.

There is a lot to talk about here, so we get into all the nitty-gritty detail, including how we pulled it off with near-zero downtime and the tools involved.

WooCommerce is eCommerce for WordPress. It's powerful software in that it can do anything you could ever want to do in selling online. You can sell physical products. You can sell digital and downloadable products. You can sell memberships or tickets or appointments. The sky is the limit. I've used it personally for all those things and have had a great experience every time.

It's back! We counted up all the hearts given to every Pen created in 2021 and created a list of the top 100. Marie and Chris chat about this year's list. Who's on it, what's on it, and digging into the numbers where we can.

Remember that people can heart pens up to 3 times each, so if it looks like a Pen lower down the list has more hearts than one higher up the list, it's because of the density of hearts. The number you see on the card only reflects the number of people that have hearted not the true number of hearts.

Lots of folks hitting multiple times. George Francis hit 6(!) times (7, 28, 59, 75, 80, 82), an impressive feat for a member who only joined in late 2020. Four people with four placements: Aysenur Turk (3, 11, 14... and 🥁 1), Yoav Kadosh (17, 33, 72, 95), Dilum Sanjaya (22, 24, 64, 65), and Aybüke Ceylan (38, 46, 63, 91), and a couple of 2-position people. Woot!

"Full page" layouts were quite a trend on the Top 100 this year. That is, Pens that look like complete websites with widgets and cards and navigation and sidebars and the whole nine yards. That's opposed to some past years where more minimal small-yet-surprising Pens were more dominant in the Top 100.

Advice for those shooting for the top? Talk about your work. Almost nobody on the list creates work and then never shares it. Share it on social media, blog about it, make a video, re-promote it multiple times. Be part of the community by liking other people's work. Remember, your hearts come from other CodePen members. Also, feel free to update and revise your Pens. Many of the Top 100 are updated and improved even after their initial wave of popularity.

Did you Netlify offers auth? They call it Netlify Identity. Why would you need auth on a static site? Well, a static site can also by quite dynamic, that's the nature of Jamstack. Say you're building a TODO app. No problem! You can have users sign up and log in. You can store their data in a cloud database. You can pull the data for that user from the database based on information about the logged-in user because of Netlify Identity.

Olivia Ng has done loads of wonderful work here on CodePen and off (check out her super cool travel bucket list site) She got started just out of pure desire to build things. "I just really like the internet" she told me. Hear hear! Her eye for design takes all her work to the next level. She had a particular focus on grid for a while there, and used those interesting designs to teach it. Also find her on Twitter and on her personal website.

There are lots of reasons to look at Jetpack for your self-hosted WordPress site. One of which is the powerful search upgrade you get just by flipping a switch. Say you run a lot of WordPress sites, perhaps for clients as an agency would, now Jetpack offers a Licesning Dashboard for managing all the Jetpack subscriptions so that becomes a lot easier.

Jhey Tompkins is one of the most prolific CodePen creators out there! Find him as @jh3y on CodePen and @jh3yy on Twitter. His creations tend to have a twist of whimsey while being beautifully designed as well as pushing the platform in unique ways. You'll always be surprised at a Jhey Pen! I talk with him about the creative process, problem-solving, and sharing what you learn.

For companies of all sizes, Notion provides one central and customizable workspace that can be tailored to fit any team and bring all teams together to get more done and move faster. Notion is an all-in-one team collaboration tool that combines note-taking, document sharing, wikis, project management, and much more into one space that’s simple, powerful, and beautifully designed. Find out how Notion may be the missing piece your team needs to grow, get more done, and delight everyone who uses it in the process.

Rachel and Chris dig into the many, many ways in which we use Notion at CodePen. Heads up, Notion has sponsored a couple of episodes of CodePen Radio lately, but not this. It's just a tool we heavily use and this podcast is all about that sort of thing. Heck, this podcast itself was planned in a calendar database on Notion, which deals with dates, publication status, sponsors, and all sorts of stuff. And it's probably one of the least involved Notion setups we have. Much more involved is stuff like project planning and our individual structures for our company-public weeknotes.

The big news from Jetpack is that all backups are realtime now. Realtime backups are awesome. Anything that happens on your site, it's backed up immediately. That makes backups extremely useful as there is no risk you have to miss three-quarters of a day of content, purchase, comments or anything else because all you have is daily backups.

You might recognize Ben Evans from his absolutely incredible CSS "paintings", like the portrait of his daughter or the still life. Paintings aren't the quite word as Ben designs them all to be entirely scalable. And sometimes they have interactivity, like the slight parallax in the Vaccum from Space. Like so many other great artists, Ben's skills aren't isolated to CSS trickery, his portfolio reveals artist exploration across nearly every creative outlet there is, including moss, and as I learned in our conversation, even music.

For companies of all sizes, Notion provides one central and customizable workspace that can be tailored to fit any team, and bring all teams together to get more done and move faster. Notion is an all-in-one team collaboration tool that combines note-taking, document sharing, wikis, project management and much more into one space that’s simple, powerful, and beautifully-designed. Find out how Notion may be the missing piece your team needs to grow, get more done, and delight everyone who uses it in the process.

This week I talk with Gabrielle Wee, who's done loads of creative coding work here on CodePen but like so many other creative people we talk to, her creativity explodes into so many other areas like illustration, photography, drawing, and even gardening. Plus a desire to share those techniques. Her path has led her to be working at Apple, a dream job.

Gabrielle on Dribbble and Twitter.

Some advice from Gabrielle: doing work that she was personally interested in, rather than pandering to any recent trend, was much more fun and led to more clear success. Also: be curious and inspect element.

Jetpack has some good news. All backups are now in realtime, whatever plan you are on or buy. If you already have daily backups on your plan, email them them to get on the new system. The blog post has details. Real time backups are amazing, because you can back up to very specific moments in time (say, right before a certain post was edited) rather than the more broad sword of having to pick a day.

Today I get the pleasure of talking with Aaron Iker. Aaron builds incredibly delightful bits and bobs of UI that give you the feeling of hey, I bet I could actually use this! And that's exactly what Aaron wants you to do. He takes care to make sure the code is easy for you to use if you wish. This idea of taking somewhat practical-looking UI elements, like buttons, loaders, toggles, etc, and then making them do something unexpected and fun is a perfect fit for popularity on CodePen. Last year, Aaron occupied 10 spots in the Top 100! Aaron's advice: keep challenging yourself.

Netlify is Jamstack hosting with all sorts of features to help make developing sites easier (have you seen Netlify Dev? You can run the whole platform locally) and deployed sites better. But Netlify is a big place! They do all sorts of community things like Jamstack Explorers, a whole learning platform for leveling up your Jamstack skills. Not to mention several YouTube channels loaded with learning and fun.

We've been naming all our services cp____ lately. Get it? cp is short for CodePen. Clever, I know. We have many such services. The latest to join them is cpshots. We've been doing our own screenshotting for a long time now, but like all software we're always working on it for various everchanging reasons.

Robert and I discuss this last round of changes to this service. Part of the purpose of this round is that we wanted to bring image resizing in-house to keep costs down. We need screenshots in various sizes because we literally show them in different circumstances at different sizes, but also because of the responsive images syntax. That resizing we do with sharp via a Lamda. But we only want to do it once! That is, whenever a Pen has changed and the screenshot needs to be regenerated. In order to do that, we send the requests to a Cloudflare Worker which, through the KV store, knows if we already have the screenshot or not. If yes, send it along. If no, head over 1) the screenshotting service to get the screenshot 2) the Lambda for resizing it 3) over to S3 to store the images 4) back to the Cloudflare Worker to serve it.

It's a lot of moving parts! But they are all very smart, simple, tuned parts that are designed to do what they do well. The best parts, for us, is that this project was a great excuse to give Robert a trial-by-fire of a fairly complex tech stack, and that we made literally every part of it work on both development and staging. Making sure every service of CodePen runs locally means that there is no secret magic, we can all work on it and see it working.

Huge sales in WordPress land! As we write, there is less than 4 days left in the Jetpack Black Friday Sale, which is 60%+ off all Jetpack products and plans for your first year. Over in WooCommerce land, nearly everything in the entire WooCommerce marketplace is 40% off and there is less than 6 days left. It's worth it to spend a little time thinking ahead about what you might need for the year ahead as these deals are pretty massive.