CodePen Radio

Show Description When Mailchimp announced major changes to Mandrill, the service we were using to send the vast majority of email out of CodePen, we had to make some major changes of our own. Cost was one consideration, but the most important change was that we wouldn't be allowed to send out our newsletter through […]

Show Description We use a thing called Solr. We brought on a contractor — Andy Smith - to help us scale and improve Solr. Andy is into big data stuff and this, as we learn, qualifies as big data. As I write, there are 7.5 million Pens on CodePen, each with it's own chunk of […]

Show Description Joakim Johansson writes: I am writing to you because I would love to know how it evolved. Like did you have the whole thing figured out from start or just some core feature and then iterated around it? I am asking because I recently got a project of my own funded but I […]

Show Description We start with this admission, to which everyone agrees: None of us have a complete understanding of how CodePen works. At this stage, some of us think that while this is true, we could figure out the parts that we don't currently know. Hopefully that stays true for a long time, but there […]

Show Description We often get asked what it's like to work at a startup. So in this episode we thought we'd discuss what a startup means to each of us and what it's like working at CodePen at this stage (definitely "early"). We also run through some FAQ's about working at CodePen. Show Sponsor CodePen […]

Show Description In the previous episode, we talked about how we received a DDoS threat, and how our reaction was to beef up our infrastructure rather than pay. Turns out, as we also guessed, the threat was empty. We were well aware it could be, but also knew the beefing up would be worth it […]

Show Description We recently got a Dedicated Denial of Service threat email. An empty threat, probably (so far so good). But still, we're about the right size of a business to target and any amount of research will show that sometimes these things are real. We were absolutely under no circumstances going to give criminals […]

Show Description Pagination should be simple right? It's just some arrows you click to move between some content. We should probably be used to this by now: it's complicated. There are UI complications (e.g. making sure the buttons stay where there are, when they can). There are UX complications (e.g. can you make it fast? […]

Show Description We've been using Front the last few months at CodePen for customer support. It handles incoming email as well as Twitter in a unified, team-based inbox. In this episode we talk about what it does for us, why we like it, and how we've customized it for our needs. Show Sponsor Sign up […]

Show Description The whole gang is together! Last week we had a whole-team get together and we figured we'd record a podcast while all there. All of us have been on the receiving end of feature requests from our community. There are many spectrums on which to place these requests: Light - Heavy Technical Debt […]