Hey gang, time for another broad update about various goings on as we tend to do occasionally. Some various happenings around here, appearances on other sites, upcoming conferences, and the like.

I’m speaking at a handful of conferences coming up!

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At the end of this month, October 29th-30th, I’ll be speaking at JAMstack_conf. Ever since I went to a jQuery conference several million years ago (by my count), I’ve always had a special place in my heart for conferences with a tech-specific focus. Certainly this whole world of JAMstack and serverless can be pretty broad, but it’s more focused than a general web design conference.


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In December, I’ll be at WordCamp US. I like getting to go to WordPress-specific events to help me stay current on that community. CSS-Tricks is, and always has been a WordPress site, as are many other sites I manage. I like to keep my WordPress development chops up the best I can. I imagine the Gutenburg talk will be hot and heavy! I’ll be speaking as well, generally about front-end development.


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Next Spring, March 4th-6th, I’ll be in Seattle for An Event Apart !


Over on ShopTalk, Dave and I have kicked off a series of shows we’re calling “How to Think Like a Front-End Developer.”

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I’ve been fascinated by this idea for a while and have been collecting thoughts on it. I have my own ideas, but I want to contrast them with the ideas of other front-end developers much more accomplished than myself! My goal is to turn all this into a talk that I can give toward the end of this year and next year. This is partially inspired by some posts we’ve published here over the years:

…as well other people’s work, of course, like Brad Frost and Dan Mall’s Designer/Developer Workflow, and Lara Schenck and Mandy Michael’s thoughts on front-end development. Not to mention seismic shifts in the front-end development landscape through New JavaScript and Serverless.

I’ve been collecting these articles the best I can.

The ShopTalk series is happening now! A number of episodes are already published:


Speaking of ShopTalk, a while back Dave and I mused about wanting to redesign the ShopTalk Show website. We did all this work on the back end making sure all the data from our 350+ episodes is super clean and easy to work when, then I slapped a design on top of it that is honestly pretty bad.

Dan Mall heard us talk about it and reached out to us to see if he could help. Not to do the work himself… that would be amazing, but Dan had an even better idea. Instead, we would all work together to find a newcomer to design and have them work under Dan’s direction and guidence to design the site. Here’s Dan’s intro post (and note that applications are now closed).

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We’re currently in the process of narrowing down the applicants and interviewing finalists. We’re planning on being very public about the process, so not only will we hopefully be helping someone who could use a bit of a break into this industry, but we’ll also help anyone else who cares to watch it happen.


I’ve recently had the pleasure of being a guest on other shows.

First up, I was on the Script & Style Show with David Walsh and Todd Gardner

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYO_HWarRes&w=560&h=315]

I love that David has ressurected the name Script & Style. We did a site together quite a few years back with that same name!

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I have a very short interview on Makerviews:

What one piece of advice would you give to other makers?

I’d say that you’re lucky. The most interesting people I know that seem to lead the most fulfilling, long, and interesting lives are those people who do interesting things, make interesting things, and generally just engage with life at a level deeper than just skating by or watching.


And my (third?) appearance on Thundernerds:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js


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If you happen to live in Central Oregon, note that our BendJS meetups have kicked back up for the season. We’ve been having them right at our CodePen office and it’s been super fun.


I haven’t even gotten to CodePen stuff yet! Since my last chronicle, we’ve brought in a number of new employees, like Klare Frank, Cassidy Williams, and now Stephen Shaw. We’re always chugging away at polishing and maintaining CodePen, building new features, encouraging community, and everything else that running a social coding site requires.

Oh and hey! CodePen is now a registered trademark, so I can do this: CodePen®. One of our latest user-facing features is pinned items. Rest assured, we have loads of other features that are in development for y’all that are coming soon.

If you’re interested in the technology side of CodePen, we’ve dug into lots of topics lately on CodePen radio like:

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