Val Town Newsletter 23

Steve Krouse

on

Jan 22, 2025

🥳 Happy 2025! Last year, our product grew from a JavaScript playground to a stable FaaS (Functions as a Service) platform that thousands of engineers use in personal and professional contexts. Some highlights from 2024:

We have big plans for 2025. By the end of this year, we aim to be a mature cloud platform that serious engineering organizations use for core infrastructure. Here’s some of the highlights:

Projects – groups of vals, files folders – with forks & 3-ways merges (currently in private beta)Scalable infra & usage-based billingTeam accounts for companies to collaborateImprovements to Discovery, Search, Townie, ObservabilityContinuing to fast-follow with LLMsSOC 2

We have two new additions to the Val Town team! Sophie is a designer, programmer, and artist, who just moved from Berlin to join us here in Brooklyn. She’s best-known for a viral app she made as a teenager, but most recently worked with Nike and Delivery Hero. Charmaine is a technical product manager, with a deep background in developer tools. She’s worked at Snapchat, Unity Labs, and Microsoft. We’re thrilled to have them both on board.

Vals are great for small projects, but what if you want to build something bigger?

Introducing Val Projects, a new way to organize multiple vals, files, and folders into a single place. Where a Val Town Val is like a GitHub Gist, a Val Town Project is like a GitHubhttps://blog.val.town/_astro/ProjectsExample.D6yYVcko_Z12nhXr.webpD6yYVcko_Z12nhXr.webp" alt="Val Projects Example" loading="lazy" decoding="async">

Projects support:

Static assets, like images, videos, CSS, HTML, and moreMultiple files and foldersScoped environment variables (that code outside the project can’t access)

Projects will soon support:

Branches, forking, pull requests, and three-way mergesTownie, with the ability to understand and edit multiple files

Projects are currently in private beta. We’re looking for more passionate Val Town users to try it out and give feedback. If you’re a Pro user, please reach out to steve@val.town, and we’ll add you to the beta.

“What can I do with Val Town?” We get this question a lot, so we made a https://blog.val.town/_astro/Templates.Ae7avFhx_Z2mYKen.webpc="/_astro/Templates.Ae7avFhx_Z2mYKen.webp" alt="Val Town Templates" loading="lazy" decoding="async">

Check it out and see if it sparks any ideas for you! Maybe you’ll find a val that’s perfect for your needs and you can fork it and make it your own. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, let us know. If you want to submit a val to be included, we’d love that too!

Deno 2 is out, and Val Town is now running it. We’re currently on Deno v2.1.2, but you can always check which version we’re running here.

In addition to some performance and security upgrades, Deno 2 also includes a couple exciting features:

process and Buffer are now globally available, which means you don’t have to import them anymore, which increases compatibility with Node.js code (example)WebAssembly imports are supported out-of-the-box (example)

We made three changes to our pricing:

We now have a yearly plan for $100! This is a 20% discount on our monthly plan 🥳We’ve explicitly listed custom domains on the Pro plan, with a limit of 10We’ve changed the val runs limits from per minute to per day. Now you get:
Free: 100k runs / dahttps://blog.val.townhttps://blog.val.town/_astro/Pricing.BCquImgI_VYjKj.webp

One final word to the wise: we plan to increase our pricing soon, but existing customers will keep the same price, so sign up soon!

There’s been a lot of great content about Val Town recently, a podcast, a livestream, 5 blogs, and (unfortunately) 2 post-mortems:

The logged-in Val Town homepage is now the dashboard, which shows your recent vals and projects. You can find the old homepage at val.town/home.We updated val Run & Save buttons to be easier to find, and provide more immediate feedback

Val ProjectsFaster & scalable runtimeObservability upgrades: searchable & filterable logs and tracesMetrics to track your usage and limitsNew Explore page for discovering valsImproved code searchComments on pull requestsTeam accountsAbility to follow a Val Town userSOC2 compliance…and much more!

Please make feature requests and vote on what you’d like to see next.

Steve relaunched Cerebras Coder, an app that generates websites in under a second. Over 100k projects have been created with it!Paul, who leads Chrome’s Developer Relations team, made an Email Summary Service for newslettersMichael from Notion made a Notion web clipper to save Notion content to WallabagEllie Huxtable added a “recent listening” widget to their websiteSam powers the “Latest YouTube video” part of his site with data from a val (post on bluesky)Bao, an iOS engineer at Notion, created the Cipher Challenge, a game to decode a letter substitution cipher as quick as you can. It’s even multiplayer! (post on bluesky)Bryce made a daily email digest of a github repo’s activity (post on bluesky)Morry made a website where people can take pictures of his cats in his window and submit them via QR Code + emailPrasham made a Val Town README Generator - type in your username and val’s name and it’ll generate a readme with AI you can copy and pasteMax used vector embeddings to get “vibes” search on emojisJohn made cron vals to snipe hard to get nintendo museum ticketsJan made a fresh - an invoice generatorPrasham made a calendar app for viewing ICS filesSteve made a val that shows the top 100 Val Town users by number of public vals - did you make the cut? (tweet)Steve from tldraw made an example custom endpoint for tldraw computer’s data component. Jordan agrees that tldraw and Val Town are bestiesVictor made Let Him Cook, which lets you query database with natural language via emailMixer made a val to show their Spotify Listening HistoryTrent built a val that calls him via Twilio whenever it receives a webhookCharmaine made Townie her personal illustratorSteve made an Anonymous doc publishing toolColin from Zod built Josh Goldberg a mood diaryDavid made AI Rapped 2024Danny made Interruptible Chain, a simple interface for pausing and resuming execution chainsVlad made a val that converts Bluesky Threads to RSSNolen made the opengraph image for everyuuid.com with a Townie app he madeCharmaine added a new Reddit Keyword Alerts template with an SMS versionVictor made BYOB, Build Your Own BotBoris made a cyberpunk weather display with TownieJackson made GitHub Sync to sync vals from Val Town to GitHub and backChet made a Landscape Lighting Calculator with Townie in minutesMariano showed his users how to extend his app with a valDanny made expiringBlob, create-and-forget blobs using UUIDv7Adtiya from AWS made a site that gives you ideas from arXiv papersPeter made a dashboard that shows the most popular wikipedia articles in a given time rangeInferable made an integration with Val Town to create AI agentsJohn embraced Scott Belsky’s DIY software and made a 1000 hours outside challenge trackerJamie from Glif made a val that fetches details about media files (images, video, audio, etc) using Mediainfo.js. e.g. codecs used, duration, file sizes, ID3 tags, etc.mint made a Annas Archive/Libgen+ OPDS library catalog (tweet)Dave made a holiday drink menu with Townie (post on bluesky)Dean made a game out of captchasBen made a site for friends to cast predictions on the game awards (post on bluesky)Arfan made a kanban board todo list (as of this writing it was broken, but this fork works)dh1011 made a tool to extract important quotes from an article