336: Cassie Evans

10/06/21 • 0 min

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Cassie Evans is our special guest this week! Cassie is a front-end developer with a special talent and passion for animation and SVG, as evidenced in part by her amazing work on CodePen. She's recently became part of the team over at Greensock, a very popular JavaScript-powered animation framework.

We got to talk specifically about the Greensock 3.8 release and an SVG workshop she's got ready to that she does with the gang at Pland.

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We got to talk specifically about the Greensock 3.8 release and an SVG workshop she's got ready to that she does with the gang at Pland.

Time Jumps Sponsor: Retool for Startups

Previous Episode

335: Code’s a Drag

There are lots of types of dragging that can happen on websites. While they are all click (or tap), hold down, move, and let go, they are all quite a bit different. For instance:

Drag files/folders onto the browser window and drop them. The likely use case there is uploading.
Drag an element on the screen to another (valid) area of the screen. The likely use case is dragging cards from one column to another
Drag the position of an element. The likely use case is dividers between different areas.

There are native APIs for dragging stuff on the web, and it's nice to use them when you can as that means not relying on potentially hefty JavaScript libraries. And yet, the native APIS are fairly limited, and the JavaScript libraries that exist for this stuff are pretty darn nice.

We use Filestack for file uploading. There are lots of incentives there, like them staying on top of the latest and greatest in browser tech around this stuff rather than us having to. Back when we switched to this, we got mobile uploading support overnight, for example. For drag-elements-to-other-areas we use react-beautiful-dnd, which is a pretty darn nice library for that, especially since we're using React anyway. Interestingly, as robust as react-beautiful-dnd is, it doesn't really support position-dragging at all. Just not what it's built for. So for that, we've gone back to the trenches to write our own componentry, which is a delicate balance of JavaScript event-powered and CSS behind it that supports the changes.

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Next Episode

337: ES Modules on CodePen

ES Modules are a native feature of JavaScript! The import and export keywords are actually a mighty powerful thing for a language to have. You can use them right on CodePen of course. For example, with our URL extensions, you can export stuff from one Pen and import it in another without having to use […]