The world still needs people who care - CodePen founder Chris Coyier interview [Podcast #212]

Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of free codecamp. org. Today I'm interviewing Chris Koyer. He's a front-end developer and co-founder of CodePen and the famous CSS tricks blog that you've probably used a ton if you've ever tried to debug some CSS. Uh before we get to him, I want to make some quick community updates. We just

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course that will teach you how to fine-tune an LLM and incorporate your own proprietary data. This is super useful if you need off-the-shelf LMS to do novel tasks that they weren't originally optimized for. This course will teach you all about parameter efficient fine-tuning and how to use techniques like Laura and Qura to m to train your models on consumergrade hardware. No data center needed. This is a comprehensive 12-hour free course on the Free Code Camp YouTube channel. Check it out after you finish listening to this podcast and learn how to protect your sensitive data by running your LLMs locally. This course will teach you how to get up and running with Olama, Python, Langchain, and Langraph. It will also walk you through the various trade-offs you face when you want to avoid sharing your data with big tech companies. So, obviously it's a lot easier to just use the big LLMs out there, but if you really care about having your data yours and not sharing it and not having to read through a bunch of uh data sharing agreements and things like that and worry about like future acquisitions and stuff like that, you can do it locally. This tutorial

will show you how. We also published a tutorial that will show you how agents are changing the field of software development in terms of helping you build mobile apps if you're not a mobile app developer. Uh, this in-depth tutorial will get you hands-on experience with building your own Flutter mobile app using anti-gravity and stitch. You don't even need to know Flutter. You just need to understand the core concepts and make the architectural decisions. You'll quickly see how sophisticated these tools gotten just over the past few months. This is a 40minute read on the Free Code Camp publication. And the album of the week.

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Support for Free Code Camp comes from the 10,338 kind folks who donate to our charity each month. Join them and support our mission at freecoamp. org/donate. And if you want to pick up a free coamp shirt, 20 bucks shipped anywhere in the US. Go to shop. freeccoamp. org. If you want to print your own, they it is totally fine to take our logo and print it on a shirt for your own personal non-commercial usage. Again, shop. freecoamp. topfree codecamp. org. Today's interview I'm talking with Chris

Koyer again, founder of codepen. io, which I've used, I don't know, hundreds of hours I've spent tweaking things on there. CSS tricks blog. He's written so many tutorials over the years. Uh, he's recorded more than 700 podcasts about software engineering, plus 300 episodes of Code Pin Radio. If you've heard of the Shop Talk podcast, that's like, I don't know, 10 15 years running. Uh we're going to talk about how he thinks about front-end development tools uh and how he thinks that they're about 90% of the way to where they need to be. How developing for the web is just as good as mobile and you can reuse it everywhere including on mobile. So like web development, focus on that first. He's a huge web development stand as am I. Uh and why high-skilled devs working on novel platforms don't need to worry about AI disrupting their careers because they are doing things that are truly novel. And that is not something that's in the training data. — Chris Koyer, welcome to the Free Code Camp podcast. — I'm super glad to be here. Thanks, Quincy. — Yeah, I mean, you are a legend. You're a hero of mine. It's thrilling to be talking with you in real time. We I think we run into each other at conferences, but we haven't had time to talk, so now this is that time. — Yeah. It's awesome. Just two famous guys talking, you know. We can barely walk down the street these days, but you know. — Yeah. People are just like chasing me around. — Can I have your autograph? It's extremely rare that I get recognized actually. — Yeah. — But uh I think I'm going to start with a question that I think is a lot on a lot of people's minds right now with all the

AI assisted coding, the LLM tools. — Yeah. — Is it still worth learning CSS for career reasons beyond intellectual curiosity? — Yeah. Good question. I hope so. You know, it certainly feels I know there's some people that are just like, "Oh, I used to be useful, but now I'm just a turd or whatever. " where you're like, "Oh, that's not true. " You know, for one thing, as cool as these tools are, and there's a lot of nuance here, you know, like it's it's I don't want to be a freaking stan and just be like, "They're the greatest thing that's ever happened because I don't necessarily feel that way. " And there's a lot of like unfair crap these companies can done. But at this point, you're like, "Whoa, it's pretty impressive, isn't it? What they're getting done. " But like just as a just as one thing, the better you are at whatever you're asking it to do, CSS included, the like the sharper scalpel you're wielding with it, you know, like the better questions you can ask of it, the better prompting you can do, the better analysis you're going to be able to do out of their results. So like just learning more makes you better at using them, too. So it's kind of best of both worlds. Like I would never advocate not learning something like you know I know you asked yeah just because of intellectual curiosity or whatever that's a good reason to learn things too because it just makes you smarter and as you're smarter you're just a more effective person in the world but uh yeah of course you should learn you better somebody needs to know what they're doing around here — yeah and specifically CSS because I know like CSS tricks your blog like you've spent a great deal of time maybe more than most devs like 99% of devs actually writing CSS and working with CSS and doing front-end development like in kind of like the more like you've gone through all the different eras of front-end development and would you argue that like now front-end development is starting to resemble kind of like full stack development that there's convergence and like a lot of front-end devs know enough backend to like be able to deploy and stuff like that like have you seen a convergence skill set?

— Uh yeah, I think so. I mean, yeah, I think an individual developer is like more powerful than they used to be. And there used to be like a maybe a stronger divide from like I'm a back-end person and I'm a front-end person. And now it's like you see backend devs like being a little bit more comfortable with um building their own frontends. Maybe that's shad CN, maybe that's LLMs, maybe that's Bootstrap if you want to go old older school, you know, I don't know, maybe they're more comfortable with that. And certainly front end people are more comfortable getting their creations online in some way. I wouldn't even hate if CodePen was part of that story. But still like before that it was like you know Netlefi came on the scene and they just made it a lot easier to be like oh this repo equals this website. So just push stuff in that repo and then it's online. So yeah, I think capabilities wise, especially over like a 10-year period, is like there's convergence in that just individuals are a lot more comfortable like producing complete websites, which is in my opinion pretty sweet.

— Yeah. Well, let's talk about like the disruption though. Like of course everybody's talking about this is all you read about in like tech news. If you go on YouTube, every other video is like, I just lost my job as a senior developer and like all the jobs went away and stuff like that. uh it would be pretty easy for somebody to just punt on learning CSS, right? Instead of investing the time to get good with it if the possible outcome is like, oh, there like it doesn't matter how much CSS I know or how good I am with it, it's going to be hard to find a job. Like what would you say in terms of like how insulated you can become from these market like constraints and pressures if you actually do learn and become like an S tier front-end dev or — Oh, I see what you mean. Like if you're officially actually super duper good, are you is that more important than you know like you're going to survive a company that's like we're not really hiring? — Yeah. overcoming that gravity of yeah like the managers we can't hire devs anymore we don't have the budget for devs they're a cost center — yeah I I we'll see I feel like a little uncomfortable speaking for like what companies are deciding to do because I don't do a ton of hiring or firing I guess and that that's hard to know but I would think like yeah if you're like some god tier designer that you are you actually are a little safe because just probably because you're known and you're just so demon I guess you have to make yourself demonstrabably good though. You can't just be good in a hole. I think if you actually are like just amazing. Your personal website better be amazing. You're you better be able to like very clearly show how amazing you are. And I do think that makes you pretty freaking employable still. People want that. And it's like I don't know maybe we're I don't want to focus too much on

like one tiny little period of time but I will just for a second and I know that like claude is like the big name right now and cloud code and whatever but I think these things shift over time but they're like have you seen our front-end design skill that's like a word right now. If you're listening to this two hours from now skills probably won't even be a thing but that's their thing. And if you ask it for a design and it'll be like accessing our front-end design skill. Dude, I promise you what comes out of that I could smell a hundred miles away. It just has this particular style that it applies that I can just be like, "Yeah, Claude did that. " Is it relatively nice? Sure. But it's like even more. I can smell it faster than I used to be able to smell Bootstrap. It's just like that's that you cannot launch a big time app right now and have it look exactly like that. It would just be embarrassing. I think it's not going to stand out. say what it needs to say. It's going to say, "I had an LLM do this. " And I worry that there's like a I don't know when somebody shows me like, "I made this new app over the weekend. You got to try it. " And it smells like that. I'll be like, "No, I'd rather not. " You know, I think you need skilled, talented people to make unique things. I mean, in a way, web design is art, you know, and LLMs ain't doing art. — Yeah. One of the things that like, you know, as somebody who really loves music and plays music and stuff, uh, you can hear AI music from a mile away and it's so grading and disgusting and like — revolting to your senses that like they put a bunch like they put all the great music into this giant blender and they produce this gray puree slop basically. Um, — and then they play that the restaurant, you know, I can't say I've escape it, right? But a lot of people don't notice or care. They don't know, oh, this is AI music. This sucks. They're just like, yeah, whatever. You know, I can study to it. Um, you know, like, do you think that sort of thing is going to start to happen to web design in general? like that people who can actually differentiate between like good and mediocre and again I don't want to be like clutching my pearls u but like — right — do you think that that could come for us as developers and designers that mediocrity could be good enough and could become — that's here right now that's not like it could be I think we're living in it at this exact moment that there's just a ton of that these tools are really capable and so if what they're producing is like good enough for your company, especially these like new things. I think there is a distinction between an LLM helping you on an existing large codebase with lots of context and it's just like helping you root out bugs and that kind of thing versus like I've got this new app idea and I'm just going to let it do the whole ass thing from scratch this weekend. Like that's like a like almost a different class of thing. And yeah, like yeah, if there's too much of it, will there be some kind of like mental revolt? Like I don't want to look at it. I don't want to hear it. And I think that's happening right now, too, that you get some saturation of it that just makes you want to not see it anymore. — Yeah. — Well, let let's talk a little bit more positively about like things that are happening in the front end development space. Um, — sure. you know, like what is exciting you about the, you know, the front-end development in general? We've got, of

course, like HTML 5 was a huge unlock and then we've had lots of different standards that have been uh developed over the years, which you've covered in extreme detail on your 700 plus episode shop talk podcast. It's so refreshing to tune in uh regardless of going what's going on in the world and you all are going to be talking about like developer experience and like uh you know new things that you all can do with a front end uh like what is exciting you these days about front-end development. — Yeah, that's well first of all there's lots of stuff which is pretty exciting I think and uh I don't think we need to even bother tying it to AI stuff but it is kind of fun to think about that like the newest of the new they don't even know about. So, you can't even get help with it anyway. Isn't that fun? Uh, but there's I would say in the last like two years of development, let's just scope it at that is probably like more exciting than HTML 5 was. There's like more change and more bigger, bolder, more interesting things have happened lately than that whole thing was. I mean that and that thing was big you know and it was big for free code camp I imagine too educationally HTML 5 drew this line in the sand that was like here is a bucket of stuff and we're very clear about what's in the bucket and what's not and that stuff you could just teach and you could say I will teach you HTML 5 which meant a little bit of HTML but it meant JavaScript stuff and CSS stuff it kind of circled the whole bucket uh and I think that was really cool Since then, there's been like efforts to like, can we do that again? It was not just useful for the education industry, but it was useful for everybody because they could somebody more casually that's just like I want to learn some new stuff could learn what was what's in the new bucket. Like they could if there was an HTML 6, they could like be like, I'm going to take that set of learning materials and then feel like I'm up to date. That was useful. And I think a lot of us miss that. That'd be cool if it came back. So, we'll see if we ever get that. I think there's a possibility. I think it's more likely to happen in individual like CSS starts to fragment, you know, like JavaScript already does. They do a good job with this. They have an ES release every year. ES 2025. What's an ES 2025? What's an ES 2026? Like temporal is going to be in that. And it's such a beautiful technology for working with dates and times. And it's like then you can just like learn that and then feel like you're up to date. But yeah, CSS has been popping off with view transitions, anchor positioning, starting style, just lots of incredible stuff. Like the fact

that now you can open and close modal dialogues and what they call popovers, which are awfully useful for things like tool tips and uh menus and stuff like that. And you are opening and closing it and doing it accessibly without a single line of JavaScript is like it's just warms my heart. It's so great. — Yeah. And I mean like if I had to like summarize the slow march toward a essentially like finished front-end development experience where you had everything you needed and anything you could dream of building. You could just sit down and all the tools would be there. All the colors would be on your pallet, — right? — What percentage do you think we are to achieving that? like basically front-end development being done in terms of the actual toolbox you have access, not necessarily the expression and application of those tools, but just having those tools in the toolbox. How close are we? — Yeah, I I wonder what other people would say to this. I feel like we're pretty close that there's not there to me it doesn't feel like there's huge gaps sitting there that's like, "Oh, baby, we're not even close. We're 50% there, but I can look at this. You can't do that. I think it's closer to something like 90%. Like point to me designs that are absolutely impossible to do online, but are but that you're not trying to trick the system, but they're still they're just a practical thing. Like open a magazine and show me if you can do that on the web or not or you know, show me designs through history or freshly thought of designs. probably you can do it with the tools that we have now. And then there's a matter of doing it and then there's doing it like ergonomically like the fact that we have anchor positioning now which is like take this element that's somewhere in the DOM and and like put it next to this other element and be able to describe that in a relatively like nice and logical way is very powerful. Maybe you wouldn't say like, oh, it unlocks something that would have been impossible to do otherwise, but you're doing it so much more practically and ergonomically that it just feels it feels good. And then there's the things that you'd expect like we have really solid grid layout now and columns are getting a lot more practical and all the like I can put stuff on the screen where I need to put it and do so with a language that feels flexible and kind of like ready for you know ready for consumption and maintenance over time and all that feels like what else are we missing? Can we point at little things that we don't have? Sure, maybe. I mean, that magazine one makes me think of like, I don't know, maybe you want text that flows from a box and one part of the screen to a box that feels a little unrelated somewhere else on the screen just cuz you're trying to be, I don't know, especially avantguard with your layout or something. Maybe we're missing that. Maybe we're missing flowing from place to place. They sometimes they call that region style layout in CSS. Are we missing that? we are. But eh, I'm happy to put that in the 10% missing bucket. Not saying that that's representative of some giant 50% chunk that we're missing. I think it's smaller stuff by then. I do actually suspect CSS development to slow

down a little bit the next couple of years because of how much we've gotten how quickly that it'll be smaller stuff and it's still exciting and fun to play with but less fundamental than we've yeah — big stuff that we've dropped for a huge one is like has there's this selector called has in CSS and it just says does this element have within it another absolutely arbitrary selector like is there a check like you can say body has input checked. Is there a checked input anywhere in the body? Then not only can you style the body, but you can then continue your selector and then say, well, select the footer then and do something with the footer. That like ability to express that in one statement is so powerful that it's like it's unbelievable what you can do with it. And we've gotten it so relatively recently that I concerned that a lot of people developers don't even know that we have it. You know, LLMs might not know that we have it or be able to wield it and use it in kind of appropriate ways. And that's just one thing of a slew of other stuff that we've gotten. So, you know, certainly just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript just itself is a bright spot in the last couple of years that the web APIs — are killer. You know, I've read, you

know, like, you know, an article recently that's like, why aren't some of these big time web apps or are or like quote unquote native apps that are dropping, why aren't they built with Swift or or technologies that you think of as native technologies for native apps? And it's not cuz like I don't know, LLMs just can't do it or whatever. It's because web technologies are like just as good that you can build a very beautiful app in Electron, possibly better, possibly easier because it is reusing components from the website that you already produce and have it not be like, oh, this just looks like a junky web app that they, you know, like an iframe they threw a native wrapper around. It feels just as good, maybe better than a native app. That's very encouraging to me especially, you know, cuz guys like me and you kind of we took the web path. So — yeah, I mean like I'll just say I'll leave my biases on the table like — I have zero interest in developing mobile apps. I don't even have interest in using use my phone. I have a laptop that's small like this MacBook Air and I just take that with me everywhere. And if I need to do anything that's going to take more than like a few keystrokes, I'm doing it on my laptop. Uh because I want that fully powered like form factor uh where I have like all my hotkeys and everything like that. I'm just not it. It just doesn't excite me like mobile apps. And I understand and also the fact that they're like trapped in these ecosystems that Google takes 30% or iPhone 30% and you've got like this extremely slow process of like submissions and they're trying to like nanny everything. You can't you don't have true freedom in the app store ecosystem, right? Like you can't do half the things you want to do. Uh — yeah, that's a good point. I mean data suggests that if it's a contentdriven site that you are seeing more people access your site through mobile. So some places don't have any excuse — or you could like you could just sh — like free co camp we have a like so we do have free co mobile apps on Apple — uh Android but — you know like — using web technology to some degree — we've done our absolute best to try to get that to work well like coding on a phone is hard to do as you probably know running code uh it's hard to like okay the keyboard takes up like half the screen now okay I'm done with this and like okay where am I selecting and like Apple just changed a whole bunch of this stuff in like one of their recent like versions. They like tried to hide the URL bar. So it's like this thing and I and there's like double X's. There's like an X to like clear your URL field and then there's like an X to like dismiss the keyboard. It's like really confusing. Uh and it feels like you're kind of swimming upstream trying to code on a phone. This is a great point for us to transition to talking about code pen. Uh for anybody who hasn't used CodePen, it

is an extremely useful website that I've clocked many hours on where you can go and essentially you got an HTML field, a CSS field, and a JavaScript field, — right? — And you just start building. — Can you talk about it a little bit? — Yeah, I mean it's exactly that. And certainly we got uh a lot of users for a really long time still really um from free code camp. So thanks for that. You know, I think that was it was encouraged. you know, it might have been like a step or whatever, like go do this and then say that you did it as part of your free code camp curriculum, which was nice because you all do such a good job at like catching people early in their like I want to learn how to code and obviously the free part of free code camp is highly appealing to a lot of people and good for the world certainly and then to have them be like well you can kind of see what you're coding if you do it over on code pen because that was the core premise is that you don't have to install anything you just go to a website and you have a code editor and you can level up a

little bit from there too. It's like people would use it because for example SAS was popular for a long time still is to some degree. It's just not like a hot name or anything but I want to write in that. How would I do that locally? Well certainly I have the ability to do that as a developer but it means I got to like set up a little web server to serve my you know files. I need to set up a little build process that processes my SAS or you come to CodePen and you just flip on the SAS processor and you just start writing in SAS. The idea was you just it's just easier um to get going. But the origin of CodePen was was blogging, you know, it was from the CSS tricks days. I was just showing some college students this the other day like how old school it used to be like early days CSS tricks the blog. I would make a demo and I would like FTP it up to a folder somewhere so that I would have a URL that I could go show them the result of the demo I was trying to do and it was just kind of on them to view source or something and look at it. A lot of times I would take those files and I would make a zip file and then I in the blog post I'd be like download the zip to get the code and then they'd unzip it and then they'd have copies of the code. So you could put code in a blog post. That's not so bad. But you're not really like you're like, "Oh yeah, prove it. " You know, like — it's much more compelling experience to look at the code and look at the rendered output of that code at the same time. — And there was apps to do this a little before CodePens's time. So we didn't like fully invent this, but JS Fiddle was really big, still around. JS Bin was popular from Remy. has been Remy still runs that and is blogging about to this day. You know, we picked an industry where nobody ever dies unfortunately. — It's like all there's only ever more competition and — and you've been going for like 10 12 years. Like how long has Code Pen have been a thing? — Yeah, almost 15 I think cuz two 2012 was our beta. So we were around in like 2011. So I don't know 16 years I guess. — Yeah. And so tell me like you just released version two 2. 0 after — Yeah. After all time. — Yeah. Let's talk about like that's a major release. It's not a point release anymore. That's like an actual like full release. What happened like what did you roll out? — Well, yeah, I can tell that story.

I think I of course I'm highly interested in telling that story because it's fascinating and relevant to me. Um, you know, but rounding that out because it's relevant to this story is that you make what we call a pen, non-code pen, and then you could pick it up and put it on a blog post. I mean, you can put it in a free code camp blog post if you want to. You certainly put it on CSS tricks, but we wanted other people to use it, too. It was in the React docs. view docs. Chrome uses it. Apple uses it. All kinds of places do it. they put it in there because it's this proof hit, you know, the proof is in the pudding thing. There's the code, there's the output. You can't fake it. There's no hallucinations here. There it is. There's the code. Uh, which I love. Right. So, the point of it was helping those type of sites. To this day, about half the traffic to CodePen comes from the embeds that are sprinkled about all around the whole internet, which also is good marketing. I don't know how you all ever did marketing because you're crushing it that way, but you have we all different tactics. I don't think either of our strategies was, you know, buying billboards or whatever. — We've never spent a dollar on advertising, which as a charity, you know, that's like part 51c3 tax exempt charity. So, uh like the IRS doesn't like for you to be spending a lot on advertisements. Like what are you trying to do? And like donors don't like to see like oh fundraising is this huge percentage like uh a lot of charities you'll look and they'll be like you know 60% of their money that they take in they're just using to go get even more money and it becomes like this infinite money glitch type thing. But um that's not what investors want to see or not investors but donors. — No. And it's more appealing even from the startup angle too is like eh that's a weird money sync like it we prefer that it's viral for some other reason like your word of mouth is really good or whatever it is — getting apple. com and like all these other websites to literally embed your um code pens has got to be like good for SEO I would imagine. — Yeah. And it's not secret there's a big freaking code pen logo in the corner of those embeds. — Yeah. So yeah, I can't say we never spent a dollar because we probably like sponsored some newsletters and stuff here and there, but we never had a big advertising budget for sure because we kind of got it for free because of the embeds. Not to mention just CSS tricks in general and stuff that I owned and could write about whatever. So kind of a nice hack there. But yeah, at one point we, you know, we took a little bit of investment uh which we still have uh but that was the only round we ever took and we used it to hire a few people because it felt a little safer because we had a few more bucks and then we made this product called projects and the idea is you know how you describe it. That's how everybody thinks of CodePen. There's HTML in a little box and CSS JavaScript in a little box and then they all get smashed together and they show you the preview. That's okay. Like I'm happy that people think of copen in that way, but we would also have people tell us that they lose us sometimes and they're like, "Well, what if you need two HTML files? All right, got to go somewhere else. " You know, — I mean, that's like the constraint the key constraint that makes Code Pin so approachable and unintimidating is just those three different boxes and not

having like a giant, you know, build process and — everything that comes with having lots of different — in a way. I want to not lose those people. Like I don't want to like turn our back on what was successful so far because look at we have employees. We're doing just fine. Everybody getting paid around here. Uh miraculously, let's hold on to that. I don't want to pivot so hard that we're forgetting about that. But this projects thing, this was a bunch of years ago now, was the idea that like we'll give you the sidebar, too. And that if you do want two HTML files, you can you can do it. and it supported largely the same stuff as the pen editor did. The main distinction was that you got a file system with it. The problem is it was like a different world. It was like just a you'd have to think, you know, you'd have to know about it. You'd have to decide which one you're going to do, a pen or a project and stuff. And it like did okay. I'd say it was not a failure of a product, but it never really took off in the way that I wanted it to. So, okay, time goes on, you know, and we're like, what what what can we do here as you know, man, technology changes, front-end design changes, and not just the core technology, the browser stuff, which I admit I get like the most excited about, like what actually browsers can do, but I get excited about the tools too, like all kinds of there's the churn in new frameworks across just the JavaScript ecosystem. It's just unbelievable. It's unbelievable how much that stuff changes. And those are processors too, like spelt or something. That's a JavaScript language that needs to be processed. Does CodePen support? Can you go play with spelt? You're the same type of person that I want to support. You're a front-end developer and you care about this language. No, you can't. We don't have spelt support on CodePen. That bugs me as a business owner. You know, you're like, "Oh man, we're not serving the entire Spelt community because we just don't have that as a processor. " But time kind of, you know, passed us by a little bit. Like you just felt also kind of assumes you're processing those files kind of in the context of a file system. Not really what pens had with just the three boxes. It's a little weird to do that. Vue was kind of the same way. Vue has this concept of view files andview files need to get processed down and kind of bundled together and they have their own little way of doing that, especially now because of VIT and all that. So, at one point we're like, well, let's make an editor that's just for Vue. I think a lot of people don't know we have this, but it's I think it's still live there. You could go do it now. It was an editor that was specifically designed just for view files, and we'd process those for you. But now we got and we did the same thing for Flutter, too, believe it or not. So, we have a Flutter editor, a view editor, the project editor, and the pen editor. Starting to be a little too much technical debt for our small team to be managing all these editors. And the 2. 0 0 idea was founded on dang, we want to support so many more ways of

building things, but this way we're doing it now isn't cutting it. What if we can, you know, do the one ring to rule them all kind of thing? Can we build one editor that can just do everything and then we can shut down these other editors and make kind of make everybody happy? It's the same old school code pen. Three boxes, you use the three boxes. If that's all you care about, rock and roll. You got it. You want to add files to it. Okay, you can You want to add different ways of processing, you want spelt, you want other things like that, we can add those in there, too. Like, what if we could do it all? So, we, you know, went back to the drawing board and was like, can we build a system that can support the the fact that we know everything's going to change, that there's processors that are coming out that we haven't even heard of yet, and we want to architect this thing to support those. So we built it and that's what CodePen 2. 0 is. It is in public beta now. We finished it. It took forever but it in a in a way a forever not like a we are dragging our feet. It took a long time to think about and architect a system that worked for this and do it in a way that's backwards compatible with everything we've ever done uh and supports the future as well. It took a long time to get the details right. Not to mention we're the type that just do everything ourselves. It's a we're not using anybody else's editor. It's is just a totally handcrafted experience through and through. Uh and we did it while supporting the old code pen as we do it. So I — interesting. So

— stoked. — One thing that jumps out of there what you say like you just want to do it right. Like you seem maniacally obsessed with doing things right and that come came through when we were talking about you know AI slop and stuff like that earlier, right? Like you just there there's this craftsmanship in you would you say? Is that a fair characterization? I hope so. It comes from our team too though. Like it's kind of it just became a cultural thing. My co-founder is Alex Vasquez and he's huge on this because we've had so much success in um like slowing down and being like if there's a problem we're going to make it like the cultural thing that we're going to do that if there's a userfacing problem on this app we are going that's the thing to fix and we're going to do that as long as it takes until we're not hearing about bugs very often at all. So, so that's a like that's a kind of an example of doing it right. That didn't come from me. It came from Alex and but it came from me seeing how Alex wanted to roll and like helping embrace that as part of the culture of the company for a long time. And it got to this point that we're like this is stable as hell. And I feel like if people don't think about that as codepen, they feel it. That like one of the reasons you might come to codepen and use it is because it just works and I all the time it's never down and there's no bugs. It's, you know, it just does the thing that it needs to do. — That's not on accident. And it requires like you know a a culture that is will fix anything at any time you know like that that's the top priority to do and but that's a little bit at odds with making a new 2. 0 that's absolutely from scratch because it's hard to prioritize both of those things. So for a long time the priority remained making the existing code pen extremely stable and do things that our customers needed to do and then when we have time we're working on 2. 0 and then that dial had to shift over time where it was really stable so it wasn't taking up as much of our time so we can dedicate more time to the 2. 0 product. — Yeah. I mean like I see direct parallels with what free co's doing. Of course, we're working on version 10, the core curriculum. Uh, and the version 10, like we we've gone through so many revisions from my janky like — JavaScript tutorials like where you're like just rendering the cat photo app

and now it's like this extremely robust projectoriented series of — thousands of hours of course work and frankly uh at the same time like we want to serve everybody who's going through that but we also want to serve the people that are like I don't have time I don't have 2,000 hours to learn programming I want to know how to use an LLM to get basic things done for my job I'm not a developer I'm an accountant I just need an app that does XYZ. — So we're to some extent we're like trying to serve two completely different demographics. Those that actually want to learn coding and those who just want to get dangerous — to use a term frequently used in web development. They want to get dangerous with these tools. So they can actually like look and understand what's going on but they don't need to ne they need recognition not necessarily recall if that makes sense. — Interesting. that's kind of like how we're looking at it and like how can we abridge the curriculum to just get people like a fast track to being able to do AI assisted development and so we're trying to serve like the people who do like you and I who want to learn the fundamentals and who think like there is no knowledge that is not power and that everything you learn makes you more powerful and like why wouldn't you want to compound all that but there realities where people are just too busy like people need to make money now to pay for their kids they can't necessarily — uh um you know — hypothetically two years from now get a junior developer job like that is not going to solve their problems today and a lot of people want to maybe get dangerous and then go and backfill later with the curriculum. So to some extent we have to build out like we're trying to finish version 10 of the curriculum and it's coming this year. We're working very hard on it and like probably like 70% of free cooking 15 dedicated to that. But we're also publishing tons of courses on like how to use like open claw and you know use vector databases and use like various LLM. — Yeah. Because you want to be up to date with the times, right? — Yeah. Like — so we're trying to like meet the market where like two different markets essentially — uh with our teaching and it sounds to me like you have like probably a big audience of diehard just like hey just give me my HTML CSS and JavaScript and I know what I'm doing. I don't need like some framework to do the heavy lifting. I'm just going to go in and like let me drive manual and then people are like oh well I've got this big heavy you know tool chain and I want to bring that over to Code Pen 2. Is that an accurate assessment of like how you're trying to kind of serve both? — Yeah. Well, you know, not turning your back on the simplicity of it while

supporting more complicated workflows. Yeah, that's true. That in that I feel like that was a little bit hard to pull off, but it seems like we're doing okay so far and the through our beta processes and things like that. Yeah, it's interesting. your curriculum is like are you like even like pulling detail out of the curriculum like this like a course that was a deeper dive is like not totally gone but like slightly more shallow because then it makes it quicker to finish or not quite. So, we're first like the main thing we're doing is just getting all the detail there like really going in and like sketching out everything. And then we're going to like try to strategically subtract and — uh you know essentially like uh compend I'm trying to think of a good verb — annex uh or not annex but like um — kind of like uh whenever like the complete works of William Shakespeare versus the — you know uh what is it like digested amended version of a bridged yes we're trying to abridge — the free co because we still think people need to learn these key skills Python JavaScript HTML CSS, — yeah, — Bash, um, Git, Linux type stuff, uh, SQL, stuff like that. We still think people need to learn that stuff, but it could be that like people just need to get dangerous with that stuff and then they can go do some stuff, build some projects, and then they can come back and when they're ready, — yeah, perhaps — finish. That's a fascinating thought. I

think of something like, okay, CSS has some fundamental concepts called like the box model or whatever. It's width and height. Okay, everything on the web is a rectangle. So all every element's a rectangle and you can control it and you can push away other rectangles with margin inwards on your elements with padding and then there's a border and then there's an outline but the outline's not part of the box model. All this fundamental stuff that you know but then all of a sudden not so long ago we got names for all these things like margin and padding and border and these things that they're called logical properties. So instead of saying padding left, we have pad padding inline start. And for a lot of us that just, you know, are Englishspeaking people making English websites, those two things are synonymous and they do the exact same thing. But we were told like, hey, maybe it's smarter if we use padding inline start instead of padding left because they are actually a little bit different. The idea is that it's padding along the direction of where the text starts. So uh if the language were to change to a right to left language like I don't know Hebrew or something that the padding then still is on the side of the text where the text starts and it actually translates better. So if all you ever used in CSS instead of left and right and all these there's logical versions of the same ones that it it's just kind of nice. it's better for the web. So from a curriculum standpoint, man, do you spend a lot of time teaching margin left because that's margin left is how we grew up. That's what we did. Or do you just scrap it? Just throw it away and just teach margin inline start to begin with because you're trying to move a little faster. You know, I I'm not asking you exactly what you're doing, but that's the kind of thing that I might consider trimming away. — We have several projects dedicated to the box model. uh such an important notion within CSS for example but CSS is just a very tiny part of what we're trying to teach uh you know because like the number of jobs out there where oh I just work with CSS all day like that is a pretty small percentage which whereas like if you look like I think like 50 or 60% of all job postings are web developer jobs but they're like general full stack developer jobs so CSS is just a very tiny skill within that entire thing — it is yeah but admittedly who's getting hired just as like your job is only CSS here that's almost it hasn't wasn't ever true I don't think and now it's very — being a specialist and being like T-shaped as the marketer might say where you've got like the general purpose thing but you're really deep in CSS or you know like

you're really deep in you know like getting performance out of or you're really good with like wom and stuff and like you know translation — yeah that can be great although I feel like it h it's like almost better once you get hired like if it turns out that you get the job and then you're like amazing at CSS and people see that it can help you thrive at the job but maybe not get the job. So careful. — Yeah. I mean like maybe the managers aren't so specific in what they're like can this person go through all these tickets and fix all these bugs and like for that they're looking for like generalists. So free code camp is essentially like a factory for generalists. We tell people like okay here are the most likely things. Here's like the critical kind of like core of what you need to learn and then go forth with this. But what I tell people is like be a generalist and then specialize on the job once your employer's like saying like, "Hey, why don't you do more of this work? " And then you learn you kind of like learn the more specialized stuff on the job. And of course, like every time I even open my mouth and talk about jobs, people in the comments are like, "What jobs? What jobs? They're all disappearing. The sky is falling. " Like, what would you say to somebody in the comment section right now on YouTube who's like, "This is like you're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Like, none of this stuff matters. " uh because again it comes up constantly. It's all I hear whenever I'm trying to teach people and I go to other people's channels and they're

teaching like uh you know esoteric CSS properties and stuff like that and it it's just — people kind of coming in with the gloom and doom and like feeling the general melodies like our days are numbered as developers. It's over. — It's just it's felt like that for a while. I think if you're a person who's looking for a job and having a hard time doing it that you can be real vocal about that perhaps, but it's been a it's been not the hottest market for tech even before AI stuff started up. So I can kind of see how that's true, but haven't I've seen a little bit of data that's not the case that hiring is down a little, but it isn't like haved — it's nowhere near that. Yeah. So, I think people start that change and they don't realize, oh, this is the year-on-year change. It's not like the total number of developers, total number of developers has contracted a bit, but I don't think it's nearly as bad as — people seem to think like just nobody's hiring me. — Yeah. — Because — I think we're going to learn a lot in six months. Like these tools are not like, okay, they're here, they're arrive, they they're super duper capable in a lot of different ways. And if the job market doesn't like absolutely get smoked in 6 months, then I don't know like I don't think that change is like all of a sudden going to show up years from now. And I'd like to think I'd like to hope at least that people who know what they're doing are still important in the world. That like that I need I want to hire people because I don't care if they're using AI or not. I need somebody to be responsible for this product. I need to tell you, hey, we need, you know, two-factor off built into this thing and it needs to get done right and I'm going to ask Jeremy to do that, not Claude because I need Jeremy to be responsible and own that at this company, you know, and I need a developer to do that. Maybe I could do it on the weekend or something, but my place's real full already, so I need somebody to do that. And I think that's just true generally of work. We need people to talk to and to be responsible for things and all this type of stuff. Just because the technical bit is maybe a little easier than it used to be is not like a complete story of employment. So I'm optimistic in that way that we need responsible people to be doing the work still. — Yeah. I'm not going to ask Claude to do it. I'm gonna ask Jeremy to do it. I love it. So, um I want to transition a little bit to talking about you and your lifestyle. Of course, uh you're out in Bend, Oregon, which is not Silicon Valley, right? Um it's not San Francisco. It's not Palo Alto. — Um why Bend Oregon when you like

frankly like anybody knows anything about you, you sold you know uh CSS Tricks to um Digital Ocean, but you're still you're out in Bend, Oregon. uh what inspired you to like live out there as opposed to like if you really want to be like in the heart of a lot of the techn technological like disruption and innovation and stuff like closer to the Bay Area. — Yeah. I I've never felt that strongly about stuff like that. I'm like you know how computers work, right? We're all connected with the internet. — Yeah. So, like — the bits reach uh Bend, Oregon about uh two or three milliseconds after they reach, you know, um San Francisco, right? — And I've always been like pretty online as a person and be like, am I missing something because I like can't go to the JavaScript happy hour at, you know, in the mission or I don't even know. I don't know anything about — I think there are a lot of JavaScript hours in the mission. I've been there. Grab food. — Cool. Yeah. Like that's neat and all, but is that like totally fundamental to the thing? I think what's more fundamental is the VC scene of like if I need to raise money, I need to be talking to people in person because that's what the culture asks of for that. So I think if your goal was at one time anyway, I have a startup and I need to like be part of the startup scene, then being there with your flesh and blood mattered. But I never I was never in that mode. Never once. The round that we took at CodePen was just friends and family kind of thing. And uh and I didn't beg for it. I not that I'm above that, but I just wasn't in that mode. Like I'm like, if this works out and works out good for everybody, cool. But I'm not putting together a pitch deck that's showing our growth curve and all that crap. I I don't care. And I'm so involved in tech. I started CSS tricks when I was like in my parents' basement essentially in Madison, Wisconsin and then moved out to Portland and was just doing it at my buddy's house and then I moved to Chicago and did it like I and never in any of those places was I like totally like embedded in the tech scene there. I embedded myself in the tech scene, you know, I blogged and that's how I operated things and and that was fine to me. So this idea that I needed to be somewhere geographically to get anything done, I always like bristled against that. I'm like, "No, you don't. Do you have the internet? Cool. That's the tool that you need. You're fine. " That's what I thought. Anyway, I say that and then I lived there for a little bit because after Chicago, I was like a big I was basically a woo fanboy on CSS tricks. I was like, "This app is amazing, man. You can make forms off it. " I don't know if you remember it, but it still exists. It's like a form builder app and you just dragged and dropped the fields that you need on there and then it had a million other features like e-commerce and logic and the yada yada. It was a great app and I was always like I was working at an agency at the time and I'd use Wufu for everything. It was like if you need dynamic form data which every website did especially at the time Wufu is your buddy you know and I was so vocal about it. This is another like trick you know you like something why don't you talk about it? the world needs a little positivity in it, you know, but I would talk about it all the time. And then I was happened to be invited to a conference where somebody from Wufu was also speaking at it and they were like vetting me to to work for them, which I was so excited, you know, and they had me down for an interview and I got the job at Wufu as my first like startupy job. Moved down to

Florida, worked for them and then that app was so good that u they got bought. They got bought by a company called Survey Monkey that everybody knows out in um their headquarters were in PaloAlto and they wanted us to all move out there and I was like sign me up you know so I did spend some time in Silicon Valley even there I wasn't it wasn't like my success happened because I was rubbing shoulders with the right people because I happened to be there like I didn't do that I like bought a camper and camped and like did some mountain biking and I never even went up to San Francisco. I've been in San Francisco like five times in my life. — Wow, — that's crazy. Uh yeah. So, so that's where you met your co-founder for Codeman. Uh — yeah, he was — Wooz. He we were in Florida and then he he took the trip with us. We all lived within like half a mile of each other in Palo Alto. Some of us chose not to live in the city just for some reason. — Yeah. And you know, I just liked the like slower pace of life down there. I think I just lived in a duplex and I thought it was cool, but it was also outrageously expensive. Oh my god, Palo Alto is not a, you know, and I felt I was just kind of burning money. So when it came time for me to leave, basically I like vested my stock and stuff in Survey Monkey. I was like, "Okay, bye. I don't like working at an office. I like working from wherever the hell I want to work. " — Yeah. I ended up moving out of there and all that. I think your original question was just about like geographics. How did I end up in Bend? Yeah. Another guy that worked at Wufu and worked at Survey Monkey was Tim Sabbat. He was also an original co-founder of of CodePen but left. — Um he lived here in Bend and I'd come out to visit him just to work together and whatever. This town visits very well, Quincy, man. Like you come to Ben, you're going to be like this is a charming ass little mountain town. Maybe I will. — Yeah, — next time I'm going up to Portland, maybe I'll stop by Bend. — Yeah, — please do. — It's just visits nicely. We have nice food and, you know, the skiing is 30 minutes away and not particularly overcrowded and so the winter scene is hot here, but there's a beautiful river through town that you can tube and just I think it's just very charm. I was always very charmed by it. And I'll tell you, I think it lives just as well as it visits. Like I'm still charmed by our little town. I love living here. and there's enough people and it's enough, you know, that we get good concerts. There's a Whole Foods, you know, it's like you don't sacrifice a lot living in a town of this size. I feel like it's still pretty nice in that way. So, that's why it's because it's a nice place to live. — Yeah. Awesome. Well, I want to talk about writing because that was your big

entree into software development. That was your like, who is this Chris guy? Oh, yeah. He writes freaking CSS tricks like the blog that everybody used back in the day to learn about like — how to get things done properly with CSS because everybody can just you know kind of like MacGyver some stuff together right but like to actually do things properly in a sustainable maintainable way you kind of propagated a lot of best practices what got you into writing and let's talk about like the changing nature of writing uh and blogging. — Sure. Yeah, that was a big unlock for me in the world. Like pretty much this whole journey that I've been on my whole life started from CSS tricks probably, which was funny at the time. You know, there was I think a kind of a renaissance of CSS writing or something at the time with like Dave Sheay and Dan Cedarholm and Zeldman of course and Eric Meyer and stuff who were writing a lot about CSS. But then there was like this almost like a lull. I don't think they necessarily stopped writing, but CSS wasn't it didn't move very fast at all and it just wasn't that interesting maybe for a minute in the like I don't know 20 20067 zone you know we were still very worried about IE5 and stuff and like articles about dealing with IE6 certainly. — Yeah and IE stands for Internet Explorer. — Yeah, — a lot of you might not remember that. That was like we had to spend way too many brain cells on dealing with IE for too many years. And that's kind of nice now that nobody even thinks about it. You don't even have to think about Edge. It's a perfectly good browser, but like browsers are we kind of like won the war. You don't have to think about cross browser compatibility that much anymore. You do a little, but it's for the most part it's fine. Anyway, so I picked it up. When I started writing about CSS, I had no business doing that. I didn't know what those old luminaries knew, but I just didn't care cuz you know there's a time when you're young and you just don't even know what you don't know. You just are like I don't know. I'm just going to do it. And I would just write about the dumbest crap. But event once in a while something would

hit. It was also the early days of like Smashing Magazine and they were much bigger than CSS tricks and they would I would they do roundups at the time like the hundredest coolest tips or some crap and they'd put some crap of mine in there and I'd see the traffic go up and I'd get so excited. I'd redesign the whole website because oh I'm getting visitors now. I need to make it really beautiful looking. — And then I would have more incentive to write more articles and then people would comment. It was a WordPress site, so there's by default kind of a comment thread. You get a couple of comments, Quincy. Man, you're It's so thrilling. It's still thrilling to get comments. — I mean, there's this saying that like men don't get a lot of compliments. Like if somebody compliments you like uh you know, like, "Hey, great job on that interview that you just conducted with Chris Cyer. " Like that sticks with you. You're like, "Oh, damn. " Like, — it truly does. It does. — And so, so like having like a comment that's like, "Hey, like this was a really helpful tutorial. Thanks. " That does mean a lot to creators. — Yeah, even if it's that simple. But at the time in those early days, I'd get literally sometimes a hundred comments on an article. You know, people articles would if it got a little popular, people just they had stuff to say and it would be complimentary, but it' also be like, did you think of this? Here's my take on it. I disagree. Even those are fun. you know, intellectual disagreement is also thrilling to me at still, you know, as long as it's respectful and all that, which obviously it should be or critique. Um, anyway, so that was all the incentive you need is is that and I wrote every day at least once a day, you know, and that over years and years that turns into a lot of stuff. And at that time, two things were also very important. SEO, you could become a subject matter expert by writing and blogging a lot. Google just rewarded the crap out of that at the time. So, I got great SEO from articles. You know, I'd write about a topic, it's the number one thing because the domain the you know the whatever they call like the power authority uh was pretty high. — Um so, so Google was good to me in that way because I was good to Google. I didn't do anything nefarious. I just wrote I just was a subject matter expert — doing what you're supposed to do, right? And like that has been the social contract with Google. you write good stuff and Google sends you traffic. And of course, they very uh kind of like sneakily said like, well, you know, if you generate stuff — and it's on longtail SEO topics that we don't have good articles, that's fine, too. And next thing you know, — I don't know if you've had this experience where you Google a topic and you're like, "Oh, I wrote about this a while ago and like, oh, I used to be the first person, but now there's an AI slot version of my article actually referencing my article and linking to it and that has outranked me. " So many — almost that's why I'm speaking of the past tense here because like stuff has changed you know. — Well let's transition to that how things have changed. — Yeah. It's basically worse.

Not to be old man shakes fist but you know — that's what it was. And the other thing that was true though is that I've always been interested in making money from the things I do online. And so it was it kind of fell in your lap at that time or my lap anyway was um you can put display ads on the site that aren't even gross. They're just like I don't know FreshBooks wants to run a little ad on there and they're willing to pay you 300 bucks a month to do it. — Can do Fresh Books happy to send you that invoice, you know. And that those numbers went up and up as traffic went up and as demand went up. Uh which was great. And then it gave way to doing sponsored blog posts here and there. And it gave way to um video spots. And then eventually I had like a site sponsor of somebody that really had a bigger budget. Treehouse was a longtime site sponsor. They were educational. — They're a vend Oregon company. — Are they vendor or something? Maybe they were Oregon. I don't remember. It was Ryan Carson and his troop of original people. — Uh good stuff. Uh yeah. And they, you know, I quoted them some high ass number. Who knows what it was, 10 grand or something, you know, like, you know, and then they were just like, "Sure. " And then I put them at the top of the site and at bottom of articles and stuff and they were happy to pay it, which is incredible money to me. So now it's not even my job. I have a job and I just blog on the side because I just get a kick out of it and I don't, you know, I'm single and don't have a kid and, you know, redesigning a weekend, redesigning a website on Saturday or working on features is a damn pleasure. So happy to — Yeah. Like those days back before all the obligations where like, hey, this money I can spend on pizza instead of, hey, this is money I can spend on childcare. — Yeah, exactly. you know, — so it was when I was leaving Survey Monkey that I was like, I think I make enough money to be okay from just this. It was still a little bit of a leap because, you know, a a six-f figureure job that you just turn off is never feels great. — But I at the time I was like, well, what if I just do more? I can write more. Maybe I could hire somebody, which adds a little bit more risk, but then we can really get going and churning on content and stuff. Maybe I can make a membership program. Who knows? You know, and I tried all that stuff. — Yeah. — So, that was kind of the journey of all that. — So, I'm going to ask a pretty invasive question here because like critically you and I like free co benefited great deal from the blog creator ecosystem as well. I wrote more than 500 articles and of course like you do a lot of podcast. This is episode 210 or something of the free code camp podcast, right? Been doing this for many years. Um and like the creator economy is kind of like under pressure right now from competing with essentially like you know blendered up versions of ourselves essentially. — And also uh you know Google itself has basically just put AI overviews or whatever they're currently called at the top of search results. So whereas you might be the top link, uh there might be some CSS tricks article written by Chris Koyer that's going to be like basically this giant collapsible thing like several scrolls down where the first link will actually be, right? Or maybe do you remember them trying to tell us that we'll get more traffic now that they're doing it too? And I was like, are you sure? Because I feel like when you put the answer before a link to where you got the answer, they're probably not going to click, which is now just totally borne out to be true. We're — well, I mean, like our AdSense traffic, like we just use Google AdSense. We didn't use anything fancy. I didn't go out and like actually sell advertising. — Um, we but we just saw like the AdSense you could like set it's like no ads get rich quick. So you can see how does your channel do all that and it went from like I think we're making like 15k a month just from Google which is the cheapest like you're not going to make a lot of money from Google but we had enough that was your baseline stuff from mostly the blog right — it's like $1,500 now if even that — a tenth — over the course and that's like — you know that's the definition of decimated you were decimated that word correctly oneth — yeah that's that sucks right That's proof. You're not I mean, you're just one website or whatever, but it's not because of what you did dramatically changed. It's quality is higher than ever. — Changed. — We're publishing full freelength books written by CTO's, — right? The volunteers. We're not paying these people. They're just sitting down and they're like, "Hey, I'm really passionate about Kubernetes. I'm gonna write an entire book about Kubernetes. Publish a free cookie. " and you know is the ads is indicative of like a drop in readership frankly uh because I think and again like I don't want to be too old man yelling at cloud my goal is not to vent my goal is to illustrate that like — it's going to be harder out there if you want to do what Chris did and what Fr can't do here um and like what advice would you have — because there's multiple things like we can't just be like oh is Google they did this to us other things change I arrive to the tastes of how I want to consume this stuff changes to there. There's some people doing very well with just free video — and certainly like the arrival of Tik Tok is meaningful and stuff. Maybe short form is the way to go. So it's always been true that like being nimble with how you produce content has benefited, you So, if we're just like, I'm sticking to this one thing and I'm not going to change anything, then that's always been a risk in business, you know? — Right. But, but you're a writer and I'm a writer, you know, like people are still reading. It's just that people are reading LLM output instead of like thoughtfully written by a human, right? — Has actually understands the concepts, not is just trying to predict the next token. — Yeah. Writing will always have a place. It's just it's to pin your career to it now is harder than it was. — What happens to developer blogging and the entire blogging model in terms of being able to sustainably blog when discovery breaks and attribution breaks and you don't even know whose work you're reading anymore because maybe it's cited but it's cited so cryptically in like some kind of smash down — footnote. It's like 10 characters long ellipses and you don't even get the full URL anymore.

— Right. I feel like the only reason they do that is to be like, "Look, we got this from a real place, you know, not because they expect anybody to click on it because certainly nobody is clicking on it. " Um, anyway, uh, yeah, you're right. The incentives have changed a lot. Like I, you know, incentive used to be money sometimes. It used to be SEO value. You know, you could start a blog. You know, who is it? Log Rocket. I'm sure you're aware of them, too, because they have like incredible blogging velocity on their thing. And the reason they did that is because like, hey, if we can be high up in search results, as a result, just through sheer data and traffic, we'll sell some pro accounts to our logging product, too. That math is probably changing. And then people are leaving less comments because I don't know, people just they stick to their Slack. They're already in 10 Discords, you know, they don't need to like leave one stray comment on one blog post. Blah, you know, they don't care. So, it's changed. the incentive has changed, but there's always been smart people who use writing as something that they choose to do that are outside of any of those incentives. They don't really care. They want just to get it out of their mind. And I think we see plenty of that still. Uh I'm sure LLMs are excited that people are still writing fresh content out there in the world, but they are to some degree. I subscribe to plenty of developer blogs of people that are just writing because they just need to. I'm one of them. I just even though the incentives have dried up to some degree, it's still rewarding in its own way. Like I have to get this thought out. And I think there are some benefits still. I still look at students and people young in their journey that like there's still benefit for you. At least if you're going to apply at my company someday, I want to see that you can communicate ideas with words. because we're still doing that and we're probably going to be doing that forever. A, you know, a GitHub pull request you need to explain with words. Communicating with me via text or Slack or email is still done with words. And you practicing writing those words good can happen through a blog post. Not to mention it makes you provably you in a world where that's slightly more difficult than it used to be. But if you have a blog and I can say, "Oh, look, there's you, you know, explaining how suspense works in React because you did it during your internship, that's worth a billion points and my sliding scale of points. " — Yeah. And I'll say like clear communication ability as shown through like writing is indicative of clear thinking capability, critical thinking, problem solving, higher level reasoning, like all these things come through and how you communicate. Like I'm not a native level Chinese speaker or a native level Japanese speaker, but I can kind of get a pretty good feel for how — I guess intelligent somebody is even if I'm talking to them in one of my second languages and maybe they're not even a native speaker of that language and they're just doing their best to communicate. I love that.

— Yeah, you can absolutely kind of like think about like understand how thoughtful they are, how much are they just talking about themselves or are they talking about people ideas, right? And things like that, right? uh and a lot of that comes through and so I think if nothing else even if the remunerative layer is stripped out and you can't make any money blogging anymore. Uh just the practice with articulating yourself and distilling concepts down into something that can be communicated and understood by another person. Um that is an incredibly powerful skill that will serve you well. But, uh, what are the like I'm going to read you a quote because I thought it was such a profound interesting quote just about how much you care. — Uh, you said quote, "I'll probably be explaining border radius tricks into the dirt with a stick after the apocalypse. " — That sounds like something I would write probably. — Yeah, you are a very verbose person. Like I've read a lot of your blog posts, obviously 700 plus episodes of your podcast. I can't say I've listened to all of them. Uh but you have a lot to say, right? Um — how do you get like what advice would you have to somebody get getting enough interested in a topic to have so much to say about that topic? — Like frame that because it does make you think that it makes gives learning this secondary angle, right? You learn so that you can become more interested. Like if you have a passing interest in something and then you learn more about it, it almost makes you more interested in learning even more about it or you'll learn that you're not that interested or something. But it gives you this secondary thing like the more I learn about CSS, the more I want to know, you know, the you know or just web technology in general makes me more curious about like how does this interact with that? What's the security model here? How was this implemented? what's performant and what's not performant like deeper subjects than just like the surface level. How does this thing work? But I would never be asking those deeper questions if I didn't understand how the surface worked uh to begin with. So I like that and writing might be your way in there. Writing is also famously a way of understanding something more is that you think you know it. In fact, if you ask yourself like how well do I know this? Chances are you're going to be like pretty well, dude. You know, like people have like a little bit of a self-inflated ver thing of how much they know. I watched this person once be like, "Put your hands up like this, you know, for the YouTube. " Now, now do steer and take a, you know, move one lane to the right. You know, you're driving down the highway. Move one rain to the right. How do you do it? You go like this, right? Cool. We did it. We moved one lane to the right. No, you didn't. You crashed into the freaking gutter because you didn't sell. you didn't come back the other way too, you know, like you can't explain it because your brain just thinks, ah, you just go like this a little bit. Now you've changed your trae trajectory 10 degrees to the right. You never came back to the trajectory you were already going on this straight highway. You just that's just such a silly little thing, but it's like, well, it's because you just didn't you just you're just full of you just thought you knew because of course I know I know, — but you don't really know. try writing it down and find out how you know, know, — and I feel like that's a great analogy for like uh you know, vibe coding, for example, like it's easy to feel like, oh, I'm a wizard. Like I I can accomplish literally anything when you're just looking at the you know, the chat log as it's like, okay, we're going to do this now. We're going to touch the spell. It's easy to feel like, and I like it like a lot of people watching Twitch, watching like some really prolevel on Twitch get all the head shot and stuff like that. like the nature of like the mirror neurons or something like it makes you it deludes you into feeling like you're really good at the game too but you're actually really bad if you put the mouse and keyboard in front of and music example of this like uh oh you think you understand music like try playing piano it's like playing Dark Souls except instead of like a PS2 controller you've got 88 keys you have to press them with frame perfect input every time right — there you go — I mean like I feel Overconfidence is the disease and practice is the solution to that over that disease like the cure — and make it provable. Give yourself some stakes. I used to say that about websites too is like if you make like a personal website for example you've given yourselves like real world stakes — because other people can see it where just practicing is one thing but like an open mic is another thing to come back to the music example because now there's like some real stakes. People are going to see you produce that song just like people are going to see your website, experience your website. — So, putting yourself out there and continuing to uh do it like despite the fact that it is like both you and I acknowledge like a very adverse uh like economic environment, I guess, for creating stuff. The attention has been kind of like steered away and there's less attention. But if you shout loud enough, pe some people will still hear you. — Yeah, I think so. and and maybe just doing it for yourself too is is okay. It makes it more authentic in a way you know you're not like I am producing this blog post because I have heard that people that it will give me a 8% leg up in the blog market or whatever like I don't know I might be able to sniff that out. — Yeah. — Whereas if I — you have to have some intrinsic motivation too or else you — Yeah. — It's going to be forced — right and if you've learned if you're like I can't do this. I don't want to make a personal site. I just don't want to. Well, guess what you've learned then? Maybe this isn't the thing for you. Then that's okay. — Yeah. And there are other things you can do, right? You don't have to do software development. try to build a reputation for yourself among developers. — But if you want to do that, — I mean, would you agree that there's still plenty of game to be played?

played? — I would think so. — Oh, you're not going home. — And there's maybe a little less competition. I did hear you know this is a little bit of ane data but of our local computer science crew that has h haved and uh at a bigger level thirded there's a little bit less — you're talking about the computer science program enrollment — your local university — yeah few people are enrolling in CS — yeah well does that mean that it might be a little easier for you when you get out just might I don't can't guarantee that but like I feel like maybe that correction is useful to us at the moment that those I'm not worried about those kids because they're just picking some different degree then and maybe that's okay — that that if we were just producing too many developers for a while maybe that's okay. — Yeah, we're correcting a little bit. — All the Wall Street bros who realized, oh, I can make more money doing software development than working on Wall Street, maybe they've gone back to Wall Street. — Yeah, maybe. That's what I mean. Exactly. — Yeah. I don't know that. Don't quote. I'm not like that's not researchbacked. It's just feels anecdata. — Yeah, anecdata. I love that term. Uh I do want to uh just close by thanking you for the many things you've been doing for the developer community over the decades at this point. Um like

CodePen was such a huge unlock for free code camp uh in the early days because we didn't have the sophistication to build like an editor and frankly what we have right now is still a shadow of what CodePen offers. Uh and so we do send a lot of people your way. Um CSS — much appreciated. Thank you. — Huge uh service to the community. Like I was on there, you better believe like half the people working free cooking were probably on there like just throughout the day as Google was taking them there. Um and uh like the kind of like template that you created for like hey I can just work hard and I can really care about my craft. Uh, I think that's been an inspiration for a lot of people. — I hope so. That's lovely. Really? Yeah. The coolest thing you can do is care. — Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Uh, well, um, best of luck with like maintaining and keeping up the momentum with code C codeen 2. 0. I appreciate you taking time to explain the many design decisions and the long path to kind of like figuring out how to thread that needle so to speak between like your multifile users and people who just — want to go in and have simplicity. Um yeah, that's really cool. That's going to be a good case study someday. I think a lot of people like a lot of developers and maybe even business people are going to be looking at how you did that. Uh — so there's a lot to it. I would say that we have a podcast there too called CodePen Radio — that has another 300 episodes on it which was our journey from the very beginning of you know taking funding and figuring all that out to up until now. And lately of course we've you know we we've taken little pauses here and there but we're going strong now kind of explaining what 2. 0 is all about and some of the architectural choices of how that works. So, if you're a podcast person, CodePen Radio. — Very cool. And I'll encourage everybody to check out the links in the description. Uh Chris has got lots of tasty morsels for you if you want to learn more, hear more from this guy. Uh Chris, it's been a pleasure. Everybody until next week. Happy coding. Yeah, happy coding.