• New Jul 28, 2026

  436: The Design & Message of Launch Emails (with MJML)

  Just one week off our big 2.0 launch, Shaw and Chris hop on to talk about how email is actually a big part of the launch. Social media ain’t what it used to be, and not everybody is on your app...

• New Jul 27, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: Click Something Do Something

  Maybe I’m just old (coughs dust), but if you can make a click do something in HTML and CSS alone, it always feels cool and fancy to me. Even just “click to go to another page”, the...

• New Jul 23, 2026

  435: The 2.0 Launch & Team CodePen’s Favorite Features

  The whole team is here! That’s a first for us. Today we’re launching 2.0, so we’re having a little fun in this episode picking out our favorite features. Time Jumps Links Plus a...

• New Jul 23, 2026

  The Launch of CodePen 2.0

  If you sense a joyous exhale, that’s Team CodePen in crossing this launch milestone for the most ambitious professional project any of us has ever achieved. Today, we declare CodePen 2.0...

• New Jul 20, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: Unusual Ideas

  I like how Alan questions something nearly all of us take for granted: What if We Used Proportional Fonts for Code Blocks? And he kinda leaves it at that. What if. Lots of text is almost certainly...

• New Jul 15, 2026

  434: Still Proudly on WordPress for our Blog, Podcast, and Documentation

  Marie and Chris hop on CodePen Radio for a little chat on how we’re still happily using WordPress for a variety of things here on CodePen. We’ve got it hosted on a subdomain and on a...

• New Jul 13, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: Designers

  I still think about the juicy condemnation of the design industry in Edwin Heathcote’s Why designers abandoned their dreams of changing the world. In the heroic era of design, from the early to...

• New Jul 7, 2026

  433: CodePen 2.0 is Backward Compatible with Any Classic Pen or Project

  When we set out to build the 2.0 editor, another editor in the CodePen cannon, the goal was actually to reduce the number of editors we have and support. Ideally, reduce it to one. The trick is that...

• New Jul 3, 2026

  432: Trends of 2026 (So Far)

  Marie has her eye on what seems to be super popular with CodePen users so far this year. Galleries (in different directions) Custom Select shape(), border-shape, corner-shape scroll-timeline,...

• New Jun 30, 2026

  431: Versions are Deeply Integrated into CodePen

  Rachel and Chris on the podcast this week discussion the (ahem, rather large news) that every CodePen 2.0 Pen is versioned. That’s right, you can jump back in time to previous versions at any...

• New Jun 29, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: Layers of Layers

  There’s this thing that you need to know about when dealing with z-index and trying to get some elements to be on top of other elements: stacking contexts. If you’ve got an element within...

• New Jun 24, 2026

  430: The Wild World of Keyboard Shortcuts in Web Apps

  Shaw and Chris talk about how the keyboard shortcut situation is challenging, but in the best shape it’s ever been in for our 2.0 editor. Between the operating system, browser, CodeMirror, and...

• New Jun 22, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: Makin’ Stuff

  The most fun websites to build are websites that interact with outside sources. A user is an outside source! I’m obviously a bit partial to a website that asks a user to build stuff....

• New Jun 16, 2026

  429: Why CodePen Rebuilt Its Realtime Service

  We’ve had realtime features on CodePen for ages. Back when it was pretty damn hard. Our Collab Mode is an obvious one, where users can code together. (This “just works” in the 2.0...

• New Jun 16, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: The Edge, Man

  Ryan Mulligan’s article Transition to the Other Wide with Container Query Units is some solid CSS catnip for me. Just this base thought is fun to think about: how do you move an element from...

• New Jun 9, 2026

  428: Improving The Entire Billing System (is Very Worth It)

  Rachel and Chris on the show this week to discuss a series of big changes over the last, say, six months or so with our billing system. We’ve essentially re-written this thing several times, and...

• New Jun 8, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: Design

  I’ve been doing computers for a good minute, but the Scroll Lock key still predates me. There may have been a day when I could have explained what it does, but that knowledge had evaporated...

• New Jun 3, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: A11Y

  I’ve got a couple of accessibility related articles I thought I’d share this week. I’ve specifically picked them out as examples of well-done accessibility writing. For each,...

• New Jun 2, 2026

  427: Next.js and The Journey of SSR

  Having that first response from the server to users browsers be, ya know, full of good, useful, renderable HTML is certainly better than an empty <div id="app">. You can feel it and see it in...

• New May 27, 2026

  426: Browserslist in CodePen 2.0

  Stephen and Chris chat about how the 2.0 editor (well, the compiler really) understands and supports Browserslist, a config format that lives in your package.json file that multiple blocks can...

• New May 25, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: Finding Type

  Finding the typeface you need is a whole thing. You’ll know it when you see it is one approach. Look at a lot of choices. Make sure to save ones that you think are really nice, even if they...

• New May 18, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: View Transitions

  I’ve had View Transitions on the mind a little bit after experimenting with using them to move the focus ring around the page. I found that pretty satisfying, except the part where I was binding...

• New May 12, 2026

  425: Help Your Users Help You with Debug Logs

  As we’re getting close to rounding out the Beta period of the 2.0 editor, we’re trying to close out any bugs we find or users report quickly. They could be browser-support related, network...

• New May 12, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: Check It B4 U Wreck It

  There is an airport in Bend, Oregon where I live. We’ve got a proper one in Redmond, the next town over, but a little baby municipal one here in Bend. There is a cafe there that I’m only...

• New May 6, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: Import Maps

  <script type="importmap"> Import Maps are pretty great! You get to write import thing from "place"; and then you get to map what you mean by "place". You could map it to a file in your project...

• New Apr 29, 2026

  424: File List Optimization

  The 2.0 Editor can support hundreds of files per Pen, not to mention folders mixed in which don’t count toward that total. This can be pretty weighty on the DOM and thus adversely affect...

• New Apr 27, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: ZIP first?

  I love ideas that feel clearly better than what was before. I used to feel that way about curved shower curtain bars. Like, instead of the shower curtain being perfectly straight against the edge of...

• New Apr 22, 2026

  423: 2.0 Templates

  Stephen and Chris hop on the ol’ podcast to talk about all the ways that Templates are way better in 2.0 land. You’ve always been able to make your own templates, but now you can select...

• New Apr 20, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: URLs

  In Fixing the URL params performance penalty, Barry Pollard sets up a very clear real-world conundrum. The content at these two URLs is probably the same: The content at these two URLs is probably...

• New Apr 14, 2026

  422: Supporting Packages

  Alex and Chris talk about how the 2.0 Editor supports packages from npm. The trick is both simple and complex. The idea is simple. We detect the packages you want to use, list them in an (editable)...

• New Apr 13, 2026

  Chris’ Corner: Share What You Do

  I’ve always loved a good blog post of someone just saying what they use and do. Keerthana Krishnan has a good one here with Chrome DevTools Features I Use All the Time (and Why You Should Too)....

• New Apr 8, 2026

  421: View Control of the 2.0 Editor

  Stephen & Chris look at the UI of the 2.0 Editor and show all the control you have over what you’re looking at. Way more control than the Classic editor! We share some of the thinking behind...

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