CodePen Monthly Challenge: July Recap
July’s CodePen challenge was all about Letting it Slide.
And to be brutally honest – first and foremost with myself – I’ve grown a bit weary of everything. The job search is stagnant, side projects aren’t flowing as they should, and that quiet pressure cooker of “you should be doing more” has started to hiss.
Although I’ve always been upfront about using AI as my sidekick, this month I mostly slipped into the role of an art director. Less coding, more prompting, styling, nudging. Explaining the vibe, not chasing the syntax.
Sure, I could dress it up and call it a vibe-coded mastery roadtrip, but I prefer critical honesty over aesthetic delusion. It was messy. It was slow. But it was still a learning process. And for that, I’m grateful — for having the brains and tools to do more than just “make me an x-style image”.
Week 1: 🛝 Slide In Slide Out
Not sure which side of the slide interaction fandom I fall on — if any. Week one started with a bit of internal friction: the concept didn’t spark much joy at first.
When I think of slide-in/slide-out UI elements, I often see them as visually appealing but not always user-friendly. They can look nice, but functionally? Not always worth the hype.
Still, there’s something about them — they add that slick layer of interactivity that makes a part of your brain go: “Yes, this is tech. This is sleek. This is movement.”
Week 2: 🎚️ Slide Interactions
Some time ago, I saw a woman-in-tech YouTuber reviewing reCAPTCHA redesigns made by her interns. The challenge was to come up with more creative or humane ways to verify a user. That stuck with me — and this was my take on it.
Let’s be real: no one likes reCAPTCHAs. They’re clunky, annoying, and feel more like punishment than protection. So I thought — what if you made it… cute?
Enter: boop the snoot — a simple, playful action with a dog’s face and a slider. It’s fun, non-intrusive, and concept-wise? Bots aren’t great at understanding what a snoot is, let alone how to boop one. So technically, it might even work as a basic behavioral filter.
Week 3: 📺 Slideshow
When I hear or see the word “slideshow,” my brain immediately flashes back to boring PowerPoint presentations. Fun, huh? I bet everyone loves those.
I did browse for some inspiration on CodePen and honestly saw brilliant work. But it also reminded me of a sad truth — we get really creative when something is meant to be playful, but when it comes to presenting information, we tend to suck the joy out of it.
So, naturally, I leaned into what I love: nostalgia and The Matrix. Instead of complex layouts, I chose deliberate simplicity — proof that minimalism can carry just as much weight as something flashy, if the vibe is right.
Week 4: 🎢 Slide Freestyle
Now this was an interesting turn — a freestyle challenge. Basically: do whatever, no rails, just a theme. And with that came the classic struggle of standing in the vast, open plains of creative freedom, not sure where to go.
Since there was a suggestion to revisit and expand on a previous idea, I thought — why not? My initial plan was to merge the boop-the-snoot CAPTCHA with The Matrix terminal interface. But honestly? That felt like overengineering for the sake of it. So instead, I stuck to the arcade-terminal vibe and doubled down on simplicity.
Enter: a cat CAPTCHA. Because let’s be honest — petting a cat is a nuanced, chaotic ritual, even for actual humans. Bots? They don’t stand a chance.
TL;DL:
July gave me another excuse to test my creativity — or, let’s be honest, at least poke it with a stick. I’m no creative genius, and I tend to rely on cuteness and nostalgia more than anything else. But hey, the web was always meant to be a little weird, wasn’t it?
This month actually made me reflect on why I got into this whole World Wide Web thing in the first place. UI, UX, HTML, CSS — all those beautiful acronyms. And the truth is, it all started with the simple joy of building something. Even if that something was just a “hello world” page with a button that opened another page. That feeling? Magic.
So maybe the real takeaway is this: every now and then, we all need a little reset. A reminder of why we started. Because the social media age is a pressure cooker — constant comparison, fake efficiency, and burnout dressed up as hustle. No wonder we’re all tired.