Category: podcast

Over the last year, almost every metric that you want to go up has gone up at CodePen. More users creating and doing more things. You’d think that customer support would go up at the same level. And if it did, we would have thought that was very normal and dealt with it. But customer support doesn’t have to be this static thing that just is the way it is forever. If you find that people have the same questions over and over, you can fix your app or documentation such to answer that question better. If people report bugs, you can fix them. In fact, if you do a lot of those things, you can reduce customer support even as the number of customers you support grows. That’s exactly what we did at CodePen.

The result is that our customer support went from a job nearly impossible to get all done in a day, or the point where it is a part-time endeavor for whoever is on support that day. Even while our time-to-respond to tickets has also dramatically dropped. We’re just over one hour right now, and of course hope to drop below that line. The truth is though, most tickets are half that, it’s just some tickets that slip between the cracks and take days that hurt our average.

Timejumps

Sponsor: Headless Commerce Summit

Netlify is throwing a totally free online conference: Headless Commerce Summit.

E-commerce is growing at an unprecedented rate, making everything from your site performance to your ability to iterate faster a critical business advantage.

Take have a day and go! Even if you aren’t currently literally building a headless site, it would be good to have in your brain how other people are doing it and what they are getting out of it.

The post #315: Support Success appeared first on CodePen Blog.

Marie and Chris discuss the big round of updates that went out around Team Management. There is a new “admin” role that it took us years of having a Teams product to understand that many teams could actually use. In the end, these updates to how Teams work make them way more useful. Teams can self-manage themselves in a way they never could before, and we’re hoping that makes people much happier with the product, less likely to leave because of something silly like access controls, and reduce support.

Timejumps

Sponsor: Jetpack Backup + WooCommerce

Aside from Jetpack Backup just being really easy to use and the most trustworthy way to back up your entire WordPress site, it’s the only backup solution that works with eCommerce (WooCommerce) in the way you really need it to. Say you need to rollback to a version of your site from 4 days ago because something bad happened that hosed the site. Rolling back is a good idea, that’ll get you up and running right away, but when you revert a database back 4 days, that could wipe out all the eCommerce orders and product changes that have happened in that time: not good. Not with Jetpack Backup, it will restore to 4 days ago, but then replay all the orders and product changes, so your store is up to date with reality. Vital.

The post #314: Team Updates appeared first on CodePen Blog.

Being, ya know, human beings with thoughts and emotions trying to build something together, sometimes we clash. There are big clashes. Sometimes those end in drastic changes. We’ve done that. You might have noticed that we’re down to two co-founders actively at the company. There are tiny clashes too, like needing to tell someone when they’ve made a mistake. Medium clashes (this is not a real classification by the way, it’s just how it feels) are when multiple people feel pretty strongly about something and are not in alignment. It’s not much of a clash if one person is at a 3 and the other is at a 9 on the care-o-meter. When you’re both 10’s, it’s a clash of conflict. That happens to us sometimes (again, humans). The tricky part is that conflict resolution is never straightforward. If someone feels strongly that the direction should be A, another feels the direction should be B, sometimes the solution is C for compromise. But sometimes compromise weakens a vision, and resolution needs to be A or B so that the vision itself isn’t weakened.

Are we experts in this? Far from it. Have we thought about it a lot? Ages. Do we have a long way to go in getting better at this? Sure do. The fact that we all still have extremely different temperaments for conflict at all is part of what makes it hard.

Timestamps

Sponsor: Netlify

It’s worth reading up on Netlify’s new concept of Distributed Persistent Rendering (DPR) and how that works with On-demand builders. It might just make your existing Jamstack builds way faster and better, or make possible the Jamstack for something you thought could never be.

The post #313: Conflict appeared first on CodePen Blog.

We talked about our transition to a monorepo back in episode 305. This move has all sorts of advantages for us, like the simplicity of having a single repo to pull and be up to date with and linting/formatting code in a consistent way across the entire code base of CodePen.

This time we’ll get into more of the repercussions of the monorepo from a front-end perspective. For example, since a bit part of the point of the monorepo is sharing code across areas of the site, it made sense to yoink out things that are intentionally sharable into top-level folders. For example, we pulled out our component library that way, then had to figure out how best to consume those components across different areas (e.g. how Next.js consumes those components is different than how our Rails app does. We also pulled out things like common utilities, icons, and shared styles, each of them having their own little journey on getting to work just how we wanted them to.

Timestamps

Sponsor: Jetpack

Jetpack is celebrating it’s 10th year! Jetpack does a lot, from major search improvements, full site backup, social media integration, speed boosts, and security measures. Take a look at some of those statistics on their landing page. They are really helping WordPress site owners make their sites better and the web writ large.

The post #310: Front-End Monorepo appeared first on CodePen Blog.

The post #290: Packages appeared first on CodePen Blog.

The post #271: Sending Email appeared first on CodePen Blog.

Show Description

We're two years into the #CodePenChallenge! Chris and Marie chat about why we do them, and the challenges of keeping a community challenge fresh and fun over time.

Time Jumps

• 00:47 What are Challenges?
• 10:53 Reasons to have challenges
• 13:33 Sponsor: CodePen Pro!
• 15:37 Business benefit of Challenges
• 27:03 Community challenges?

Show Links

• CodePen Challenges
• Chris on CodePen / Chris on Twitter
• Marie on CodePen / Marie on Twitter

CodePen Links

• CodePen Support
• CodePen on Spectrum
• CodePen Spark
• CodePen Pro
• CodePen on Twitter
• CodePen on Facebook
• CodePen on Instagram
• Sponsor an episode of CodePen Radio
• Buy a CodePen T-Shirt

Show Description

It's January, and that means Chris and Marie are thinking about marketing (again). In this episode we talk about the challenges of marketing and user education for a complex app like CodePen.

Time Jumps

• 00:27 Intro to the topic
• 03:41 What don't people know about CodePen?
• 15:27 Sponsor: Jetpack
• 17:43 Social media sharing
• 20:39 Asset Manager
• 28:30 Why this happens every January?

Sponsor

Jetpack

Jetpack is full of features. If you have had the feeling that you're paying for more than you need, you're in luck, Jetpack is starting to have features you can buy individually. Jetpack Backup is one of them, the best way to backup a WordPress site there is. If that's the only paid feature you need, you got it. Just $3 a month for daily backups or $20 a month for realtime backups.

Show Links

• Notion
• Chris on CodePen / Chris on Twitter
• Marie on CodePen / Marie on Twitter

CodePen Links

• CodePen Support
• CodePen on Spectrum
• CodePen Spark
• CodePen Pro
• CodePen on Twitter
• CodePen on Facebook
• CodePen on Instagram
• Sponsor an episode of CodePen Radio

The post #251: Marketing appeared first on CodePen Blog.