Virtual Conferences Take Center Stage

The current health crisis has forced gatherings of all kinds to rethink their format. It's been interesting to watch conferences pivot from in-person events to online experiences. While the shift is born of necessity, the silver lining is that it makes these events accessible to a far wider audience — that's really what the web is at its best.

Some notable examples: All Day Hey is coming up within weeks and costs very little to attend. Jamstack Conf is set for May as a virtual event. And CascadiaJS, typically the conference closest to home for me, has rescheduled to September and will be virtual as well.

This is also the time of year I'd normally be telling you about my experience at Smashing Conference, but the in-person events have moved to later in 2020. My plans still have me attending Austin in October and San Francisco in November, but of course nobody knows what the world will look like then. One thing is certain: there are plenty of online workshops happening now, and some are deep multi-week courses.

Tito, the conference ticketing platform, has made an aggressive pivot with the launch of Vito, a platform focused on running online conferences. They've been holding their own online events fast, both to showcase the product and to fill the void left by canceled in-person gatherings. I recently participated in one of their events during Tito's Admission Online conference; all the videos have been published, including our Q&A session. If you're running an online conference, signing up for Vito's invite list is worth doing.

Jina Anne has also moved into the online event space with a series of "Ask Me Anything" sessions that last 30 minutes. Upcoming sessions are listed here, and they cost five dollars — a ticket gets you live access and the chance to ask a question yourself. Past episodes are on YouTube, and one of them includes a session with me.

On Building Lasting Value

The onset of the pandemic has given some of us more time to reflect on how we spend our working hours. In a recent interview with Balance the Grind, I shared a thought about habits and products of work:

I'm quite sure I have more bad habits than good, so take all this with a bucket of salt. But one thing I like to do is try to make as much of the time I spend working, spent working on something of lasting value.

That's why I like to blog, for example. If I finish a blog post, that's going to be published at a URL and that URL is going to get some traffic now, and at least a little bit of traffic forever. The more I do that the more I build out my base of lasting content that will serve me forever.

I was also a guest on the Coding Zeal podcast recently.

CodePen's Expanding Following Page

At CodePen, the work hasn't slowed down during the pandemic — it's actually given the team a chance to spend focused time on the product. A big investment lately has been in community-surfacing features, and the Following page has picked up three new additions:

  • A "Recent" feed that shows activity from everyone you follow
  • A "Top" feed that's a separate, popularity-ranked list scoped to the people you follow
  • Follow suggestions, tuned specifically for you

The "Recent" feed takes what used to be a fairly static page and makes it much more dynamic — you're seeing the things people you follow are up to that you probably don't want to miss. Toggling over to "Top" pulls in what's performing well among your circle, which is an entirely different feed behind the scenes.

Below both is a list of recommended accounts built just for you. CodePen becomes significantly more useful once you're following people who make things you actually enjoy, and this page is a step toward making that connection happen more naturally.

Note: the word "feed" is an internal term for us, referring to the underlying technology stream technology we use — but it's a good general-purpose descriptor for your community activity page.

Custom Pen Editors Arrive

The biggest piece of CodePen news is a first step toward what we're calling "Custom Editors" — that is, Pen editors that can do things our standard code editors can't. Two are now available: Flutter and Vue Single File Components. This is the start of a direction where the editor evolves from a one-size-fits-all tool to one that can adapt to different frameworks and workflows.