What do you do?

A biting first sentence from Robin Berjon:

No one can explain what you do. Let’s face it, you don’t do a great job explaining it either.

The Chimeralogists

I’ve always wanted to be good at answering this question. My default answer is “web design and development”, but I find 90% of the time people assume that means freelance, and I’m not a freelancer. Then I jump right into trying to explain how I work on a tool that allows people to code in the browser and that people use it for all sorts of reasons, but I find that’s too far of a leap and I lose them.

Here’s another crack at it.

I work on a website, called CodePen. You can go to CodePen, and you can write code. We focus on what’s called Front End web development, languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

So you go to CodePen, you write some code, you save it, you get a URL for that code. We call that a Pen, it’s like a little website.

Why would you do that? Well maybe you are learning this stuff.

CodePen makes it so easy to get started, no downloading or configuring things, that a lot of people just starting out end up there. Plus because CodePen makes it easy to share what you make, that removes some awkward friction in your early days. You don’t have to upload it somewhere else or have your own website or anything.

That ease of use though makes CodePen useful for anybody though, not just beginners. Say your are trying to troubleshoot a problem with code or get some advice on a coding situation. Make a Pen, send it wherever someone needs to see it, and off you go. Maybe you’re sharing that Pen URL in a Slack or Discord channel or a Stack Overflow thread or the like.

Maybe you do client work and you need to show your client some thing? People use CodePen to do that, they might keep that Pen private, which is a paid, PRO feature of CodePen.

By default, everything everybody makes on CodePen is public and open source, which means there are millions and millions of code examples on CodePen to find. And people do!

So that’s what I do in a nutshell. I work on CodePen the website that does this and supports the millions of users doing these things.

And it’s very complicated! Keeping a high volume website with this many users running smoothly is a big job and our small team has their work.

Not to mention we’re working on a CodePen 2.0 (after 11 years of CodePen 1.0!) which is the hardest project I’ve ever worked on in my life. Maybe you’ve heard the analogy it’s like replacing the engine on an airplane in mid-air, it’s … that.

And then I ask them what they do, because people are friggin interesting.

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