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New Jan 19, 2026
Chris’ Corner: Two Liners
The real reason that fancy modern CSS is exciting is because of what we can now actually do in CSS. I remember one of my favorite dudes Hakim El Hattab made a thing called “Progress Nav”...
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New Jan 14, 2026
Chris’ Corner: Type
Jake Archibald writes that we should just not use footnotes on the web. Not use footnotes?! I love a good footnote. Or at least, I thought I did. It’s where you can stick some information that...
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New Jan 5, 2026
Chris’ Corner: Freshly-Fallen CSS
First corner of the new year, so, ya know: ✺◟(＾∇＾)◞✺ I feel like we should do CSS for this one. It’s easily my favorite technology thing and basically BFFs with the spirit of CodePen. In...
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New Dec 15, 2025
Chris’ Corner: Cloud Four
This is an appreciation post for the Cloud Four Blog. It’s one of those must-subscribes. I find myself adding almost every post they put out to my archive of posts to dig into. So since...
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New Dec 8, 2025
Chris’ Corner: HTML
There’s a new term in town: soft navigations. Basically it means “single page app” (SPA) style navigations where page stuff changes, and the URL changes, but the browser didn’t...
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New Dec 1, 2025
Chris’ Corner: Web Components
I’d never heard of a CEM before. That’s a “Custom Elements Manifest” or a custom-elements.json file in your project. It’s basically generated documentation about all the...
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New Nov 24, 2025
Chris’ Corner: Kagi Blog Typography
I’ve been using Kagi for search for the last many months. I just like the really clean search results. Google search results feel all junked up with ads and credit-bereft AI sludge, like the...
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New Nov 18, 2025
417: Iframe Allow Attribute Saga
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 errors in the console. Not ideal, obviously. The...
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New Nov 17, 2025
Chris’ Corner: Cursors
CSS has a bunch of cursors already. Chances are, you’re not using them as much as you should be. Well, should is a strong word. I can’t cite any evidence offhand that special cursors is...
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New Nov 10, 2025
Chris’ Corner: Browser Feature Testing
It’s interesting to me to think about during a lot of the web’s evolution, there were many different browser engines (more than there are now) and they mostly just agreed-on-paper to do...
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New Nov 5, 2025
416: Upgrading Next.js & React
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 definitely think of React version upgrades and...
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New Nov 3, 2025
Chris’ Corner: AI Browsers
We’re definitely in an era where “AI Browsers” have become a whole category. ChatGPT Atlas is the latest drop. Like so many others so far, it’s got a built-in sidebar for AI...
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New Oct 28, 2025
415: Babel Choices
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 @babel/preset-env plugin so you get modern JavaScript...
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New Oct 23, 2025
414: Apollo (and the Almighty Cache)
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 helps us write queries and mutations that go through...
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New Oct 20, 2025
Google Chrome & Iframe `allow` Permissions Problems
If you’re a CodePen user, this shouldn’t affect you aside from potentially seeing some console noise while we work this out. Carry on! At CodePen we have Embedded Pens which are shown in...
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New Oct 20, 2025
Chris’ Corner: Stage 2
We get all excited when we get new CSS features. Well, I do anyway. It’s amazing, because sometimes it unlocks something we’ve literally never been able to do before. It’s wonderful...
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New Oct 14, 2025
413: Still indie after all these years
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. We’ve seen...
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New Oct 13, 2025
Chris’ Corner: Design (and you’re going to like it)
Damning opening words from Edwin Heathcote in Why designers abandoned their dreams of changing the world. Every single thing on Earth not produced by nature had been designed. That was the...
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New Oct 9, 2025
412: 2.0 Embedded Pens
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 CodePen 2.0 world. No longer can we...
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New Oct 6, 2025
Chris’ Corner: Discontent
Nothing is above a little healthy criticism. Here’s Den Odell’s article We Keep Reinventing CSS, but Styling Was Never the Problem. It’s easy to forget what CSS was originally designed...
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New Oct 1, 2025
411: The Power of Tree-Sitter
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 is called Tree-sitter. It’s...
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New Sep 29, 2025
Chris’ Corner: Word Search
My daughter had a little phase of being into Word Searches. I found it to be a cool dad moment when I was like “I’ll make you a tool to make them!”. That’s what she was into....
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New Sep 23, 2025
410: Trying to help humans in an industry that is becoming increasingly non-human
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 customer support over email. Incoming email from...