A suggestion for project submissions--solved(codepen is not required)

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I don’t know about other people on here, but I hate using codepen.io to submit finished projects on here. Let me explain what I mean. Before I do that, let me preface this to any supporters of codpen.io or anyone using codpen.io as their main editor, I have no intention of shitting on your product, it’s a great tool to skip alot of build steps and just get right into coding.

Why don’t I like it?
Well, it’s a hassle. I’ll skip the obvious reasons for time sake and to keep this short, but that would include things that make developing faster like: build steps(gulp, webpack, tsc), editor(vscode, atom, etc, autocomplete, eslint, tslint etc…), live-reload(webpack-dev-server). These things take a toll on you to learn initially, but once you get the hang of how to set up an environment with these kinds of tools, development speeds up, thats the point of the tools, to aid in our efficiency. You have to learn these things to get a engineer role anyway, codepen doesn’t help learn how to fetch a lib with npm or using the @types repo if you into typescript.

Is it really that hard to just copy/paste final build into codepen before submitting on FCC?
No, it’s not. But I get to choose all the tools I use, some I use because I like them, others I’m forced to because they work best with what I’m trying to accomplish. If you want to use codepen start to finish for projects, go all the way, I also think FCC is progressing nicely and is innovative enough to allow more than ONE option.

If not codepen, what then?
I’m a big fan of hosting stuff on your own server, or heroku for server-side rendering, gives you an idea of what really goes on in companies but that’s alot for most people to handle on top of learning programming.
Why not github pages, which can host anything codepen.io can to my knowledge. Sure, you have to know a tiny bit about git, github and version control but those skills need to be learned anyway, and if it’s too much for some, then those people can use codepen.io to the heart’s content. github pages are pretty easy to setup, and you can use your original files, no need to copy/paste into a different website. That has alot of appeal to someone like me. I realize some, many, most may disagree, maybe others really like using codepen.io.

Last point:
As developers(learning, aspiring etc…), in my opinion, If i know how to setup a development environment and I can push the project requierments to github and have it hosted for free with little extra work, I feel like I should have that option over having to copy and paste everything into a different website.

Thanks for reading. Constructive, intelligent comments are encouraged.

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Hi, I agree that codepen can be quite annoying. Though, it might not be clear, I believe you can submit a link to any site you want. So you can use codepen, but github or your own server is also okay, as long as your code is visible.

This is what the about page has to say:

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I did not see that. Since the project submissions asked for a codepen.io link, i assumed only codepen. Nice catch.

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I’m the same, I really don’t like working with Codepen, much prefer an editor e.g. Atom or Sublime. Plus, web tools like Gulp, Yeoman etc once you get over the learning curve really help with productivity. Using Git and Github are a must.

The only issue I read on the About page is you must have a live demo. Is providing a link to a Github repo enough? If not, it kind of leads you back to Codepen. Or in other words, for me it would mean develop outside of Codepen then copy and paste the relevant code into Codepen.

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You can use github pages for the live demo, with a link to the repo to see the code

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Ah, of course! Good shout.

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+100 for P1xt mentioning surge.sh, which is amazing. I will be using that for now instead of github pages, very impressed.

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Thanks for the tip @P1xt, will check definitely check this out.

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Thanks to everyone who’s contributed to this thread–I’m really relieved to learn that it’s not required to submit FCC projects to codepen.io. Since I already had a portfolio-and-blog site working at GitHub, I have been including my FCC projects there, and submitting those links to FCC when I submitted the projects for evaluation.

I’ll say one more positive thing about GitHub pages: it is closely integrated with the Jekyll static-site generator, which is a great tool. Like any new tool, there is a learning curve involved, but once you’ve got it down, it makes adding content to a website much, much easier. I should point out that Jekyll is NOT a content management system like WordPress–you do have to build all your pages in real HTML, CSS, and JS. What it does is let you make templates for things like your headers, footers and nav menus, and inserts the unique content on each page automatically.

Basically, Jekyll saves you a ton of copy-pasting, especially when you need to make changes throughout your site. I built my site the first time in raw HTML and CSS, and every time I changed a link in the footer, or whatever, I had to go through every page in the site and update that link by hand. Now that I’ve created a Jekyll version of that same site, I only have to change that link once, in the template that contains the footer, and Jekyll handles the copying and pasting for me in a fraction of a second.