CodePen Radio

This week Marie and Chris get together to chat about what's been hot hot hot on CodePen lately. We've discovered there is a really taking to the creamy cardstock look, for one thing. Typography is always great, but we're seeing more typographic trickery often including variable fonts. While not new, there are still loads of really wonderfully creative Pens using Three.js and p5.js. Neon-on-dark is a fresh look. We get into those and more, a bit sneakily as we can take an internal look at what the Top 100 might look like this year, but we can't share those details too early!

I got to speak to Jon Kantner! Jon is an incredibly prolific creator, and I believe has the most appearances in the CodePen Spark of any creator. Like so many other creators I've talked to Jon also shares what he knows in a variety of ways, like writing (see his personal site, or articles he wrote when I ran CSS-Tricks). We got to chat about some of his iconic Pens, his work, and some past fascinations like Tweet-sized code experiments. Follow him on Twitter here.

This week I got to speak with Alex Trost! Alex has been hard at work created Frontend Horse, a clever brand celebrating the beautiful and clever things in our industry via a newsletter, articles, streaming, a Discord community and more. This is the way to do it!

Notion is an amazing collaborative tool that not only helps organize your company's information but helps with project management as well. We know that all too well here at CodePen, as we use Notion for countless business tasks. Learn more and get started for free at notion.com/codepen. Take your first step toward an organized, happier team, today.

This week I got to speak with Chris Smith! We got to talk about all sorts of things from blogging, to pushing the boundaries of CSS, to logic in CSS, to digging into some of Chris' most interesting Pens, to Chris' actual favorite Pen of all time.

Ken Wheeler, Tejas Kumar, Sara Vieira, Tanner Linsley – these are just a few of the names coming to this year’s React Summit, the biggest React conference worldwide. Discover the future of the React and meet thousands of front-end and full-stack engineers!

The format of the event will be hybrid. The first day, June 17, will be streamed from the Amsterdam venue. The second day, June 21, and numerous free workshops will be streamed to the global audience online.

Would you like to participate? Get 10% off on remote & in-person tickets with our discount code CodePen.

I got to talk with Lea Rosema this week! She's an incredibly talented digital artist and front-end developer. She does quite a bit of art with some of the trickiest web technology out there: shaders! But rather than just learn it and use it, she helps other people learn and get more out of it. Several times that has taken the shape of Web Components. For example, a Web Component that takes some of the boilerplate work out of designing with them. See this Collection of examples.

Evan You, Kyle Simpson, Addy Osmani, Sarah Drasner – these are just a few of the speakers coming to this year’s JSNation, a 2-day conference focusing exclusively on JavaScript development. Discover the future of the JavaScript ecosystem and get connected to its stellar crowd! The format of the event will be hybrid. The first day (June 16) will be streamed from the Amsterdam venue. The second day (June 20) & numerous free workshops will be streamed to the global audience online.

Would you like to participate? Get 10% off on remote & in-person tickets with our discount code CodePen.

I got to talk with Micah Godbolt this week! Micah is is a long-hauler at Microsoft working on Design Systems and such. His CodePen account looks a lot like mine: steady consistent usage of "just trying to figure something out" Pens sprinkled with some ideas that somehow seem to click with the wider front-end world. I found it fascinating that putting the word "Design Systems" into his book title "Front-end Architecture for Design Systems" was suggested by the publisher, and they were right! Turns out the term Design Systems clicked a lot harder since the 2016 publication and I'm sure hasn't hurt sales!

Visit linode.com/codepen and see why over a million developers trust Linode for the infrastructure.  From their award-winning support (offered 24/7/365 to every level of user) to ease of use and set up; it’s clear why developers have been trusting Linode for projects both big and small since 2003.   Linode offers the industry’s best price-to-performance value for all compute instances, including shared, dedicated, high memory, and GPUs. Linode makes cloud computing simple, affordable, and accessible allowing you to focus on your customers, not your infrastructure.  Visit linode.com/codepen, create a free account and you’ll get $100 in credit.

I got to talk to Paulina Hetman this week! Paulina is a heck of a creative coder, using her skills as an illustrator and all-around web developer to make ideas come to life. And she doesn't keep all those ideas to herself, she spends time educating other budding developers both professionally and by building courses and things like her incredibly clever quizzes (as Pens!).

Notion is an amazing collaborative tool that not only helps organize your company's information but helps with project management as well. We know that all too well here at CodePen, as we use Notion for countless business tasks. Learn more and get started for free at notion.com/codepen. Take your first step toward an organized, happier team, today.

Klare is moving on from design at CodePen to design at GitHub. Huge congrats Klare! If you didn't know Klare was our one and only dedicated designer here at CodePen and left a massive mark here in the design and UX of CodePen, the app, as well as internally in our organization practices. I'm talking with Klare here just a few days before her last day to reflect on her years here.

I got to talk to Varun! Varun is an incredible artist and would have been interesting to talk with him about literally anything, but since he's dipped numerous toes into the world of NFTs, I wanted to chat with him about that in conjunction with his own art and other artists he's a fan of.

Visit linode.com/codepen and see why over a million developers trust Linode for the infrastructure.  From their award-winning support (offered 24/7/365 to every level of user) to ease of use and set up; it’s clear why developers have been trusting Linode for projects both big and small since 2003.   Linode offers the industry’s best price-to-performance value for all compute instances, including shared, dedicated, high memory, and GPUs. Linode makes cloud computing simple, affordable, and accessible allowing you to focus on your customers, not your infrastructure.  Visit linode.com/codepen, create a free account and you’ll get $100 in credit.

This week I got a chance to talk to Kyle Shook. Kyle has started a new job at Foxtrot so we talked about what that process was like. In addition to creating all sorts of incredibly creative work on CodePen (just look at this Collection of Menus), Kyle helps other people level up their front-end skills too, with sites like Frontend Practice.

Notion is an amazing collaborative tool that not only helps organize your companies information, but helps with project management as well. We know that all to well here at CodePen, as we use Notion for countless business tasks. Learn more and get started for free at notion.com/codepen. Take your first step toward an organized, happier team, today.