Anyone else dislike CodePen?

I’ve done a few of the projects on CodePen, but I’m finding I really don’t like the environment. I’ve been trying other programs for writing code in and have found I really like CoffeCup HTML editor. I find I get a better sense of what the code is doing if I’m doing it with a different editor.

For future I’ll be writing my projects using a local IDE and coy/pasting the code into codepen.

When I first started out it codepen was a nice way to ease myself into coding, but I think coding in a local IDE as soon as possible is better.

Once you get to using an IDE, I recommend Brackets. It has a live preview feature for your web pages and it’s modular, so you can customize it to fit your needs.

I recommend this tutorial if you’re interested.

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Codepen is excellent for looking at other people’s projects and discovering really really cool stuff that creative people are doing with CSS and JavaScript! Having said that, it’s not the best for learning how to work with HTML, CSS and JavaScript files as they do a lot of the work for you (for example, linking jQuery, Bootstrap, etc).

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Codepen is nice to have a temporary space to work with also for beginner to ease into coding. But it doesn’t actually help learn the skill because a lot of stuff is taken out that any developer should already know.

Like how to link, use html tags, meta tags, etc.

If you can move on to using IDE, it will be awesome. I am sure employers don’t use codepen as their primary IDE.