CodePen Radio
Episodes
417: Iframe Allow Attribute Saga
18 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
416: Upgrading Next.js & React
05 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 d...
415: Babel Choices
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 @babe...
414: Apollo (and the Almighty Cache)
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 hel...
413: Still indie after all these years
14 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
412: 2.0 Embedded Pens
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 C...
411: The Power of Tree-Sitter
01 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 i...
410: Trying to help humans in an industry that is becoming increasingly non-human
23 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
409: Our Own Script Injection
16 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 y...
408: Proxied Third-Party JavaScript
09 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ana...
407: Our Own CDN
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Robert and Chris jump on to talk about our little CDN project. Maybe that's not the right term, but we struggled with naming it. Truth be told, it's t...
406: Hot Trends of 2025
28 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Marie and Chris jump on to discuss some of the trends of what people are building on CodePen here, approximately halfway through 2025. New CSS! ...
405: Elasticsearch → Postgres Search
19 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Alex & Chris get into a fairly recent technological change at CodePen where we ditched our Elasticsearch implementation for just using our own Pos...
404: Preventing Infinite Loops from Crashing the Browser
06 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Stephen and Chris hop on to talk about how we're saving everyone from crashed browser tabs in CodePen's 2.0 editor. One simple: Executing JavaScr...
403: Privacy & Permissions
27 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Chris & Rachel hop on the show to talk about the expanded privacy (access) model in the 2.0 editor (in Private Beta as we speak). Private Pens hav...
402: Bookmarks
16 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Pins are dead! Long live bookmarks! Pins was never a good name for the feature we have on CodePen where you can mark a Pen or Collection to more...
401: Outgoing Email
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Hi! We're back! Weird right? It's been over 2 years. We took a break after episode 400, not because we ran out of things to t...
400: Hiatus
08 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Marie and I jump on the show to tell y'all we're taking a little break! It feels like years since we've been eluding to the fact that we're working on...
399: Data Munging
01 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
There was a small problem in our database. Some JSON data we kept in a column would sometimes have a string instead of an integer. Like {"tabSize": "5...
398: DevOops
26 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Stephen and I hop on the podcast to chat about some of our recent tooling, local development, and DevOps work. A little while back, we cleaned up our ...
397: User-Generated Content Saftey
18 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
I was asked about the paradoxical nature of CodePen itself recently. CodePen needs to be safe and secure, yet we accept and gleefully execute user-aut...
396: Open Source
11 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Robert and I jump on the podcast to have a little chat about open source generally and what we do with open source at CodePen. CodePen itself is not o...
395: The Most Hearted of 2022
04 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Marie and I hop on the show to discuss our recently released Most Hearted of 2022 Pens. We only did the calculations the day before, so this is more o...
394: Very Remote Work
14 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Rach lives in Australia, so for our otherwise U.S.-based team, that's about as remote as it gets. We've always been remote at CodePen, so we have it b...
393: Challenges in 2022
07 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Marie and Chris talk about the year in CodePen Challenges. If you participate, this might be an interesting look into how we think about them. If you ...
392: Project Management Refresh
30 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dee and Chris chat about our latest take on Project Management (PM), a somewhat tricky topic for us with such a small team where literally everyone is...
391: Early TypeScript at CodePen
23 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
TypeScript ain't exactly new, but it's a bit new to us. Robert was the most knowledgeable about TypeScript on the team and felt like it could be valua...
390: The Social Media Zeitgiest
16 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Marie and I talk about what's going on in the world of social media, and what that might mean for CodePen and front-end developers. Twitter doesn't fe...
389: Migrating a Ruby on Rails GraphQL API to a Go GraphQL API
02 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
One thing that's been keeping us very busy at CodePen is moving our main API. We decided on GraphQL long ago and it's served us pretty well. We origin...
388: Durable Objects
19 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Robert and I jump on to chat about Cloudflare's product Durable Objects. It's part of their Workers platform, which we already use at CodePen a good b...
387: CodePen Co-Founders AMA
05 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A few months back, Alex and I did a 10-year anniversary episode that took the form of 10 bits of advice formed in the fires of running a software comp...
386: Hakim El Hattab
28 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week I got to speak with Hakim El Hattab. I feel pretty special as Hakim told me he doesn't do public stuff very often. I get it! He's a busy man...
385: Kristopher Van Sant
14 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week I got to talk to Kristopher Van Sant! Again! This time we got to talk about Kristopher's professional work as well as some favorite Pens. ...
384: The 300 Sparks Milestone
07 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We just recently published the 300th CodePen Spark. Marie joins me on the show, as she leads up the creation of the vast majority of Spark newsletters...
383: Soft Delete All
31 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this show, Stephen and Chris get to talk about an internal technical detail we were improving in our database, which led to a public-facing feature...
382: Bulk Actions for Assets
24 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
CodePen will host your assets, like images, data models, libraries, whatever. It's quite useful! They are easy to browse, easy to copy URLs or code sn...
381: Data on External Library Usage
17 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Marie and I this week! Marie dug up some interesting data about "external library" usage on CodePen. In the Pen Editor (specifically), you have the op...
380: Ol’ Jake
10 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week I got to speak with Jake Albaugh. Long-time listeners will remember Jake as an alumnus of Team CodePen. That's a first for a podcast guest! ...
379: Chris & Alex have been running CodePen for 10 Years. What have they learned? Here’s the top 10!
03 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Both Alex and I, the co-founders of CodePen, spent time trying to whittle down hopefully interesting and practical advice for you from our experience ...
378: Lee Martin
27 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week I got to speak with Lee Martin! Lee is a fascinating fella, due in part to him having a job I think we all want: designing weird cool digita...
377: Jase Smith
20 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week I got to speak with Jase Smith, a kindred spirit bouncing across the designer/developer line out of Denver, Colorado. Before you know it, we...
376: Ilithya
13 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week I got to speak with Ilithya, who put together some favorite Pens, some of which we actually manage to get to during the show 😂. Lik...
375: Craig Roblewsky
06 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week I got to speak with Craig Roblewsky! Craig does a lot of web animation and hangs around the Greensock forums quite a bit, giving him a uniqu...
374: Kevin Powell
01 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week I got to speak with Kevin Powell! Kevin has had tremendous success on YouTube educating people about CSS 'n' friends. But like so many good ...
373: Script Injection with Cloudflare Workers
22 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week Shaw and Chris dig into some deepnerd tech stuff: manipulating HTML. In a perfect world, perhaps we wouldn't need to, but today, and even mo...
372: Trends
15 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 cream...
371: Jon Kantner
08 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
370: Alex Trost
01 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 thing...
369: With Chris Smith
25 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
368: Lea Rosema
18 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
367: With Micah Godbolt
11 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
366: Paulina Hetman
05 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 m...
365: Klare
27 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 h...
364: Varun Vachhar
20 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
363: Kyle Shook
13 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 cr...
362: Chris Nager
06 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week I got to speak with Chris Nager! I've known Chris quite a while. I remember being inspired by his hand-drawn SVG plus symbol and subsequent ...
361: Forks in a New Tab
31 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If you Command (Mac) or Control (PC) click the Fork button, it will open the newly forked Pen in a new tab in your browser. That's new behavior. Befor...
360: Sarah Fossheim
23 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
I got to talk to Sarah Fossheim this week! One of the impressive things that Sarah does is near photograph-quality recreations of iconic old technolog...
359: Tiffany Choong
16 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
I had tons of fun talking to Tiffany Choong this week! I loved learning her process on creating countless code art Pokémon characters. Just look at i...
358: CJ Gammon
09 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
I got to chat with CJ Gammon this week! CJ is a creative technologist, a term he's tried to hang onto as he does more development work, so he can cont...
357: Ryan Mulligan
02 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week I get to talk to Ryan Mulligan! Ryan put together a Collection of some of his personal picks for favorite Pens and we get a chance to talk t...
356: Amit Sheen
23 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
I got to talk with Amit Sheen this week about his journey into creative coding. Even his early work is incredibly interesting and recent work is downr...
355: With Adam Argyle
16 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
I grabbed Adam intending to chat about all sorts of CSS stuff and his work at Google and on VisBug. But then we chatted pretty much the entire time ab...
354: With Steve Gardner
09 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We've got Steve Gardner on this week! We get into all sorts of nitty gritty detail on the ol' Christmas Cannon, a Pen of pure joy. Steve has some abso...
353: With Louis Hoebregts
02 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Louis Hoebregts (aka Mamboleoo) has been creating wonderfully creative Pens on CodePen for many years. His early work, as we learn on this episode, wa...
352: With Aysenur Turk
26 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
351: Moving to PostgreSQL from MySQL
20 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 effor...
350: 2021’s Most Hearted
12 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 l...
349: With Olivia
05 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
348: With Jhey
29 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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...
347: Using Notion
22 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
346: With Ben Evans
15 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
You might recognize Ben Evans from his absolutely incredible CSS "paintings", like the portrait of his daughter or the still life. Paintings aren't th...
345: With Gabrielle Wee
08 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 c...
344: With Aaron Iker
01 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
343: cpshots
24 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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...
342: Workers
17 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Chris and Shaw talk about how CodePen uses Cloudflare Works with the KV storage to power several things on CodePen. We do some cool stuff with them, l...
341: Challenges
11 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Marie and Chris talk about CodePen Challenges, which have been going strong for many years now. The gist is that you pop in and make something along a...
340: With George Francis
03 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Chris gets to chat with George Francis, an incredible digital artist in the generative art space as well as educator and all-around developer. George ...
339: Apollo at CodePen
27 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Rachel and Chris chat all things Apollo GraphQL. Apollo is in this weird category of software where like by far most websites do not need it or anythi...
338: With Lynn Fisher
20 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Lynn Fisher is my guest this week! You might know her as @lynnandtonic on CodePen and most other platforms. We get to talk about her A Single Div proj...
337: ES Modules on CodePen
13 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
ES Modules are a native feature of JavaScript! The import and export keywords are actually a mighty powerful thing for a language to have. You can use...
336: Cassie Evans
06 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Cassie Evans is our special guest this week! Cassie is a front-end developer with a special talent and passion for animation and SVG, as evidenced in ...
335: Code’s a Drag
29 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There are lots of types of dragging that can happen on websites. While they are all click (or tap), hold down, move, and let go, they are all quite a ...
334: Custom Properties
22 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Chris & Shaw talk about a big ol' conversion to getting CodePen's color system to use --custom-properties all the way through, rather than Sass va...
333: Robert
15 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
New CodePen team member! As we recorded this, it was just Robert's 2nd day at CodePen, and we snuck this podcast in within the hurricane of stuff happ...
332: Running the Finances of a Startup
08 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Dee and Chris talk about "everything money-related" at CodePen. Dee has been managing this stuff since CodePen's beginning. First largely pro-bono (so...
331: Next.js + Apollo + Server Side Rendering (SSR)
01 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Our goal here was to explore server-side rendering (SSR) in Next.js using data from Apollo GraphQL, for faster client-rendering and SEO benefits. T...
#330: New Admin Tools
25 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Chris & Marie talk about a big long project that we've finished at CodePen: our new Admin Tools. Any web app is gonna need 'em. They do stuff that...
#329: Gathering Data
18 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Marie and Chris talk about all the sources of data we have, think about, and use to help us. We do have one main database on CodePen, and truth be tol...
#328: Large Scale Planning
11 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Chris and Klare chat about the incredibly daunting task of planning a project that is huge and long-term. We know we're pretty OK at planning smaller-...
#327: 99.999% Uptime
04 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Chris & Alex talk about DevOps, servers, and keeping CodePen online at all times. We were are 100% for the year until a few weeks ago when we had ...
#326: Design Pattern Deepdives: Tabs and InfoBox
28 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Chris and Stephen pick out a couple of components from our design pattern library (which we talked about last here) and go into why they exist, what t...
#325: New Embed Modal
21 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Chris and Stephen talk about the New Embed Modal. We got to re-architect the thing into our modern stack, using all our latest design patterns, and im...
#324: How can we help you better?
14 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Chris and Marie talk about customer support. If you're a regular listener of this show, you'll remember that we've had a lot of success with customer ...
#323: Trends
07 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Chris & Marie talk about some of the types of Pens that have been particularly popular this year so far, now that's we're halfway through it. Ther...
#322: Upgrading Upgrades
30 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Dee and Chris talk about a recent release where we re-built the upgrade experience on CodePen. For example, you're a free user, you want to upload an ...
#321: Six Million
23 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A big milestone for us! We're now well over that number of registered users on CodePen. It's a fun number to watch — but we know it's not a particul...
#320: Andy and Una from Google’s Learn CSS Project
16 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Learn CSS is a very cool project from a whole team of people at Google (and outside). It does a great job of documenting where is right now, in a fair...
#319: Pattern Library
09 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Stephen and Chris talk about cplibrary the Pattern Library that the CodePen Monorepo can use to share components. What goes in there and what doesn't?...
#318: Anna Lytical on What CodePen Is
02 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When Anna Lytical heard Stephen and I talking about "What is CodePen?" she mentioned we did fab without her. So of course, I had to do one with her! A...