358: CJ Gammon

CodePen Radio

#Tech Startups #Business #Entrepreneur #CodePen Blog #Tech #I Got

33:58

On June 25th 2025, in collaboration with Open Folk, we presented our first ever live interview event in Los Angeles. As Open Folk put it: "In These Lines is a live event where three artists each bring one song — not just to perform, but to explore. They sit down with Sofia Loporcaro, host of Before The Chorus, to talk about where the song came from, what it meant to write it, and what it still holds. Then they play it. Just the song, and the truth behind it." Find Open Folk on Instagram: @openfolkla Find Gaby on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0K9pSmFx0kWESA9jqx8aCW?si=Wz4RUP88Qlm_RKs7QTLvWQ On Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/gaby-moreno/472697737 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gaby_moreno/ Find Lily on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0p0ksmwMDQlAM24TWKu4Ua?si=Bmdg-uIUTHu-zRUc_dqL3g On Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/lily-kershaw/526884610 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lilykershaw/ Find James on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3u50TPoLvMBXNT1KrLa3iT?si=OoLoq7ZTRZyUiytQcz0FsQ On Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/james-spaite/905076868 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamesspaite/ Subscribe: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://beforethechorus.bio.to/listen⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sign up for our newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.beforethechorus.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow on Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@beforethechoruspodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@soundslikesofia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ About the podcast: Welcome to Before the Chorus , where we go beyond the sounds of our favourite songs to hear the stories of the artists who wrote them. Before a song is released, a record is produced, or a chorus is written, the musicians that write them think. A lot. They live. A lot. And they feel. A LOT. Hosted by award-winning interviewer Sofia Loporcaro, Before the Chorus explores the genuine human experiences behind the music. Sofia’s deep knowledge of music and personal journey with mental health help her connect with artists on a meaningful level. This is a space where fans connect with artists, and listeners from all walks of life feel seen through the stories that shape the music we love. About the host: Sofia Loporcaro is an award-winning interviewer and radio host who’s spent over 8 years helping musicians share their stories. She’s hosted shows for Amazing Radio, and Transmission Roundhouse. Now on Before the Chorus, she’s had the chance to host guests like Glass Animals, Feist, Madison Cunningham, Mick Jenkins, & Ru Paul's Drag Race winner Shea Couleé. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…

3 years ago 33:43

MP3•Episode home

I got to chat with CJ Gammon this week! CJ is a creative technologist, a term he's tried to hang onto as he does more development work, so he can continue to communicate that he's a designer as well. CJ has been at Adobe for nearly 10 years and has played with a huge variety of interesting creative technologies.

Time Jumps

167 episodes

CodePen Radio

358: CJ Gammon

CodePen Radio

92 subscribers

published 3 years ago

MP3•Episode home

Time Jumps

167 episodes

#Tech Startups #Business #Entrepreneur #CodePen Blog #Tech #I Got

All episodes

CodePen Radio

1
402: Bookmarks

2 days ago

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Pins are dead! Long live bookmarks! Pins was never a good name for the feature we have on CodePen where you can mark a Pen or Collection to more quickly jump back to it from anywhere on the site. The word is too similar to "Pen" that it's just awkward, not to mention it's not exactly and obvious metaphor. A bookmark is a much more clear term and icon, so we decided to switch to it. Switching the UI is kind of the easy part. It's kind of a cultural thing at CodePen, but when we make a change like this, we change it 100% through the entire code base, down to the database itself. In order to do that, we had to chunk it into stages so that those stages can roll out independently, but in order, to make it seamless. Now that it's done, we were able to extend the functionality of Bookmarks a bit, such that bookmarking a template is extra useful. One place to see that is on the new Create page . Time Jumps…

CodePen Radio

1
401: Outgoing Email 33:54

8 days ago33:54

33:54

Hi! We're back! Weird right? It's been over 2 years. We took a break after episode 400, not because we ran out of things to talk about, but because we were so focused on our CodePen 2.0 work, it got old not being able to discuss it yet. We'll be talking plenty about that going forward. But CodePen has a ton of moving parts, so we'll be talking about all of it. This week we'll be kicking off the podcast again talking about a huge and vital bit of CodePen infastructure: our email system. Outgoing email, that is. We get plenty of incoming email from y'all as well, but this is about the app itself sending email. Timeline Links…

CodePen Radio

1
397: User-Generated Content Saftey 32:52

2 years ago32:52

32:52

I was asked about the paradoxical nature of CodePen itself recently. CodePen needs to be safe and secure, yet we accept and gleefully execute user-authored code, which is like don't-do-that 101 in web security. Marie and I hop on the show to talk this through as an update from quite a long time ago . It's wonderfully-terribly complicated. Part of what complicates it is that there are many different kinds of worrisome code, from malicious, to distasteful, to spam, and they all need different treatment. This is a daily and never-ending war. Time Jumps Sponsor: Notion Notion is an amazing collaborative tool that not only helps organize your company’s information but helps with project management as well. We know that all too well here at CodePen, as we use Notion for countless business tasks. Learn more and get started for free at notion.com . Take your first step toward an organized, happier team, today.…

CodePen Radio

1
358: CJ Gammon 33:43

3 years ago33:43

33:43

I got to chat with CJ Gammon this week! CJ is a creative technologist , a term he's tried to hang onto as he does more development work, so he can continue to communicate that he's a designer as well. CJ has been at Adobe for nearly 10 years and has played with a huge variety of interesting creative technologies. Time Jumps…

CodePen Radio

1
357: Ryan Mulligan 35:12

3 years ago35:12

35:12

This week I get to talk to Ryan Mulligan ! Ryan put together a Collection of some of his personal picks for favorite Pens and we get a chance to talk through a lot of them. There are some classic moments here I really feel, like when something you consider pretty basic gets way more popular than you ever thought it would. Ryan has a knack for feeling out really cool new technologies and then quickly using them to build great demos that play up what those technologies were born to do. Time Jumps Sponsor: Automattic Automattic are the makers of WordPress.com , the fastest and easiest place to spin up a WordPress site, without sacrificing the power of self-hosted options. If you sell stuff on WordPress.com, the built-in help to do that is powered by WooCommerce , the premier eCommerce solution for WordPress. It's the same WooCommerce whether you are on WordPress.com or not. If you are self-hosted, you can almost certainly take advantage of Jetpack , Automattic's WordPress plugin that adds enormous functionality to WordPress, like a vastly improved site search, real-time backups, security features, and tons more.…

CodePen Radio

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#329: Gathering Data 37:07

4 years ago37:07

37:07

Marie and Chris talk about all the sources of data we have, think about, and use to help us. We do have one main database on CodePen, and truth be told, it's got a bunch of data in it. If we want to know how many Pens there are, we can just ask it. We can learn a lot from asking that database questions, and we even have fancy charts that express information like that to us on dashboards. But that database isn't the only place we have data, because it doesn't know everything. It can't tell us, for example, how many times a feature is toggled on and off, because we don't track that kind of data in our main database. But we can track that data, and do when we need to with Appcues. And then there is general analytic data like traffic which we can explore with Cloudflare. And support-driven data we can look at in Front. And that's not all. When answering important business questions, the data can come from lots of sources. Time Jumps Sponsor: Clubhouse Your project management tool should be a breeze to setup, at least mildly enjoyable to use, and help evolve your already existing development workflows so it's easier to get things done. Does that describe your current tool? If it does, great! You can stop reading. If not, then Clubhouse could be the perfect fit. We're project management built specifically for software teams and we're fast, intuitive, flexible, powerful, and many other nice, positive adjectives. Delight the grumpiest scrum masters with Clubhouse .…

CodePen Radio

1
#328: Large Scale Planning 39:15

4 years ago39:15

39:15

Chris and Klare chat about the incredibly daunting task of planning a project that is huge and long-term . We know we're pretty OK at planning smaller-scale projects. We plan, we kanban, we get the job done. But a single basic kanban isn't going to cut it for a truly gigantic project. We get into talking about chopping the project into phases, chopping those phases into sections (sometimes with their own phases), and a databasing/kanbaning strategy to tie it all together. This also touches GitHub workflows and meeting structures, so there is a lot to think through here and it requires constant effort. Time Jumps Sponsor: WordPress.com Growth Summit The WordPress.com Growth Summit is coming up August 17th (Americas & EMEA) and August 18th (Asia Pacific) and is focused on running a business with a WordPress website as a core. Get expert advice on how to design your site, write effective copy, attract traffic, build a community, and earn money.…

CodePen Radio

1
#327: 99.999% Uptime 32:29

4 years ago32:29

32:29

Chris & Alex talk about DevOps, servers, and keeping CodePen online at all times. We were are 100% for the year until a few weeks ago when we had a 10 minute drop. That still keeps us in the realm of 99.99% uptime, where we get 52 minutes and 35 seconds of downtime per year, but next year we're shooting for 5-nines, that is, 99.999% uptime, where we only get 5 minutes and 16 seconds of downtime. Of course, our goals (and eventually, promises) can only be as strong as the service providers we use. Thankfully with providers like AWS and Cloudflare, we're in good hands. There are a number of things that have traditionally got in the way of this high of uptime, like database manipulation work. These days, we have the tech and the strategies for that, like seeding a newly manipulated database alongside the existing one and cutting over. We also have code in place for doing intelligent things like cutting off services if they become unreliable, rather than letting them bog down or kill the site entirely. Time Stamps Sponsor: Netlify Netlify is the Jamstack hostess with the mostest. Netlify Dev allows you to run their entire platform on your own machine. That means being able to test things like cloud functions, redirects, form submissions, etc without even having to do a preview build. Another aspect of Netlify, that is fundamental, is that you don't really have to worry about scaling on Netlify. Your static-based site is ready to scale to any level, and that includes all the cloud functions too, as they are lambdas and designed to scale.…

CodePen Radio

1
#326: Design Pattern Deepdives: Tabs and InfoBox 29:20

4 years ago29:20

29:20

Chris and Stephen pick out a couple of components from our design pattern library (which we talked about last here ) and go into why they exist, what they do, what makes them complex, and the API choices. Relatively new to us is the idea of compound components which have, so far, been good to us as far as composing components in a way that makes them easier to use and more flexible. Time Jumps Sponsor: Jetpack We're fans of Jetpack ! You might recognize Instant Search right here in the CodePen docs. But we're well aware that not everybody feels as strongly positively as we do. Last call here... have your say, tell us why you don't use it if you don't:…

CodePen Radio

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#324: How can we help you better? 17:33

4 years ago17:33

17:33

Chris and Marie talk about customer support. If you're a regular listener of this show, you'll remember that we've had a lot of success with customer support over the last year, the point that our volume of direct support is rather low. That'll happen when you fix every major problem that comes up. But it also means that we have some space to do better! It's a big bummer when we have a customer leave when they never reach out at all to get a hand from us on whatever they might need. It leaves us thinking... what else can we do? Can we help you with anything? We've been trying a handful of things to get better data and answers to these kind of questions. And that Call-To-Action: If we can do anything to help you, hit us up. Time Jumps Sponsor: WooCommerce + MailPoet = Paid Newsletter Subscriptions! WooCommerce is the premier eCommerce plugin for WordPress. MailPoet brings a fancy email builder right into WordPress. Combine the two and you get more than power of them individually. For one thing, you get extra powerful eCommerce email abilities — things like abandoned cart emails. Better, you can combine them to make a paid subscription newsletter , but powered by your own site!…

CodePen Radio

1
#323: Trends 34:34

4 years ago34:34

34:34

Chris & Marie talk about some of the types of Pens that have been particularly popular this year so far, now that's we're halfway through it. There is still plenty of time to make the best-of-the-year list (you could make a Pen the third week of December and still make it!). Heads up though, giving out hearts in general on CodePen is a great idea as it helps improve search results, helps improve your own personal feeds, and helps people feel good about what they make. Some trends are eternal, some trends are ephemeral, and we talk about them both. Time Jumps Sponsor: Netlify The original coiners of Jamstack ! Netlify helps you with everything Jamstack. They are a static file host, which is incredibly useful already, in that it means your site is fast and secure and scales forever. That also opens the door for deploy previews, which have gotten even more amazing lately with feedback tools built right in. But they also help with dynamic aspects of the Jamstack like processing your forms and running cloud functions.…

CodePen Radio

1
#322: Upgrading Upgrades 24:14

4 years ago24:14

24:14

Dee and Chris talk about a recent release where we re-built the upgrade experience on CodePen. For example, you're a free user, you want to upload an asset, you can upload via a modal that pops up, and get on with your task. You could kind of do that before, but it was much jankier UI and UX. This release brings that experience in line with current design patterns on CodePen. But the reality of this release is much deeper than that. There were a half-dozen or more mostly behind-the-scenes releases that were stepping stones to this. The biggest of which was around cleaning up our billing model and billing data into a much easier to manage and much cleaner place. While doing that work, we identified some users that needed to upgrade to maintain their status, so a big aspect of this release was reaching out to them about that, which meant building the lowest-friction-possible upgrading experience and giving us a chance to try out something we'd never tried before: discounts. Time Jumps Sponsor: Jetpack Jetpack has a brand new mobile app . It's essentially the WordPress app, except a bit more streamlined. It allows you to connect to your self-hosted WordPress sites and manage everything from content and comments to plugins and backups.…

CodePen Radio

1
#320: Andy and Una from Google’s Learn CSS Project 32:53

4 years ago32:53

32:53

Learn CSS is a very cool project from a whole team of people at Google (and outside). It does a great job of documenting where is right now, in a fairly comprehensive way. Learn CSS was spearheaded by Una Kravets and Andy Bell did the bulk of the writing, so they are two extra-special guests to have on the show to talk about it. Why CodePen Radio though? Because there are literally hundreds of Embedded Pens used in this course, all using a style guide base and are live editors in the site itself. Cool! Time Jumps Sponsor: WooCommerce WooCommerce supports Apple Pay at checkout now, which is a nice thing to offer. Some people have pretty strong preferences for how they pay online, and it's best to meet them there rather than force one particular payment method.…

CodePen Radio

1
#319: Pattern Library 39:22

4 years ago39:22

39:22

Stephen and Chris talk about cplibrary the Pattern Library that the CodePen Monorepo can use to share components. What goes in there and what doesn't? What are common and not-so-common components? Can components be combinations of other components? Time Jumps Sponsor: Lemon Productions Chris Enns of Lemon Productions edits this podcast. Got a podcast you wanna outsource the editing on? Hit him up.…

CodePen Radio

1
#318: Anna Lytical on What CodePen Is 29:42

4 years ago29:42