CSS-Tricks was a get-rich-quick scheme. Or at least an "I wonder if get enough traffic to a blog to make a little residual income" scheme. Turns out, if you write consistently for a bunch of years, it's possible.

CodePen came much later. I had already worked at a startup called Wufoo and learned a lot about what startup life was like. Wufoo is a success story in that it sold for a good valuation to a company that still runs it to this day. Tim Sabat, Alex Vazquez and I all ex-Wufoo and ex-Survey Monkey - and we're friends and we knew we wanted to work on something together. I had a little idea to build a site in the vein of the other "code editor in the browser" type site to use for all the demos on CSS-Tricks, but it didn't take long for us to realize it could grow up into something bigger and it could be out stab at a startup.

As far as tech, I'm really excited about WebRTC. Free, encrypted, video and audio connections between clients around the world powered by each other's bandwidth? That's awesome.