Val Town Newsletter 7

Steve Krouse

on

May 15, 2023

The last month saw us do two huge infrastructure projects: moving off ofSupabase and moving to Restricted Library Mode semantics. We also shipped dozensof smaller improvements, including the ability to ❤️ a val, inline npm search, anonboarding tutorial, val references, redesigned tracing, API tokens, and more!

The roadmap over the coming months is incredibly exciting! I don’t know exactlyin what order we’ll get to everything, but we’re planning simpler privacycontrols, oauth helpers, error reporting, pricing, subdomains, typescriptimports, comments, readmes, a vscode plugin, GPT somewhere, a legit logo, swag,and much more!

I didn’t have time to compile a “cool vals” section for this newsletter, but youcan help me do it for next time by liking vals that you find interesting oruseful. The explore page does rank vals with more likes higher, and we’llcontinue to iterate on its formula over the coming weeks.

We found ourselves being slowed down by Supabase, so we took a couple weeks tomove off it, with zero downtime! We’re now on trpc, zod, drizzle, and can runtest and local copy of our database, including in preview branches and githubactions tests. We’ve gotten a lot of questions about this, so you can expect ablog post about it this week.

We shifted our semantics to be safer and more explicit, and launched our API v1around the new semantics. This was a big effort and a breaking change, so wereally appreciate how everyone stepped up to make this as seamless as possible.If you’ve been using Val Town for a while, you should probably read about thechange:Restricted Library Mode.

You can now click on the references for each val. You can see that@stevekrouse.fetchJSON was referenced 619 times, and when you click on it youcan see the 208 vals that use it that are public.

Tom redesigned our tracing view. If you are logged in, you will be able to clickthe number of times a val has been run, and then view all runs of that val thathappened in your Val Town account. (You won’t be able to see when other peopleran that val on their account. You will be able to see it if they ran it viayour API. These semantics are discussed in theRestricted Library Modeblog post.)

https://twitter.com/stevekrouse/status/1655964314941943810?s=20

Now we talk about some of our best features on the homepage: cron jobs,console.email, APIs and imports!

We made a proper page to get your Val Town API tokens. We now also supportmultiple tokens, and the ability to delete tokens:/settings/api.

Sometimes it’s useful to see every version of every val you’ve ever created,including deleted vals, so you can restore them.

I made a YouTube video and TikToks about how to send form data to Val Town. Iwas also on the devtools FM podcast and endingwithali’s livestream. Please reachout if you have a podcast or livestream and you’d like to chat about Val Town,devtools, the future of coding, etc ❤️

https://www.tiktok.com/@stevekrouse/video/7221293743985462533?lang=en

We threw together a little gallery, so you couldsee how folks connect Val Town to their favorite apps, like OpenAI GPT, Discord,Slack, Google Sheets, Github, Telegram, Mastodon, Resy, Twitter, etc.

When you click on a link that takes a couple seconds to load, you’ll see theclassic progress bar loader at the top of the screen.

While it may take us another couple of weeks to build cron into the product, Idid throw together a version that works in userspace!

I know it’s annoying but we need to know where folks are hearinhttps://blog.val.town/_astro/screenshot_2023-05-15_at_150353.DUaFVWVf_ZpCxL9.webp53.png" loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/_astro/screenshot_2023-05-15_at_150353.DUaFVWVf_ZpCxL9.webp">

Press cmd, then click.

the empty new val editor component is on almost every page (the homepage,user’s profiles, viewing a single val) even when logged outmuch fewer auth bugsuserspace cron (proper cron in theproduct should be coming soon)swr → react-querystop crashing on Safari 15Upgrade to deno 1.33.0

We so many fun ideas + projects coming up! I don’t know exactly the order theseall will happen in, so reach out if you have strong preferences on what happenssooner rather than later.

Simpler Privacy ControlsMore web-standard and JS compatibilityThe ability to rename a valVal version pinningMultiline vals (modules)Val Town “Store” & ReadMe - show off how to use your valsPricing - $8 / month for pro featuresOAuth Helpers - get auth tokens to your favorite apps(Custom) Error Reporting - get notifications when your vals errorSubdomain API - needed to make ChatGPT pluginsTypescript types for imports from npmComments on valsVSCode Plugin (edit vals from VSCode)Integrated GPT - have AI write your vals for youLogo + initial swag