Val Town Newsletter 2

Steve Krouse

on

Jan 23, 2023

Our Show HN had an great reception, we loved what you all did with the tool, weclosed two security vulnerabilities, made lots of little improvements to thesite, and officially added a fourth to the team! We’re focused on bugs,stability, and security for the next couple weeks.

We did a Show HN the Wednesdaybefore last. If you’re a new friend from HN, welcome!

Probably the best way to get started in Val Town is to fork one of our popularvals:

Val Town quite good at these“Programmatic Notification” tasks.

Please jump into the Discord with any questions or DM me (steve@val.town). We’reeager to help and hear your feedback.

The ultimate joy of a toolmaker is having the tool used in unexpected anddelightful ways! Here’s some of my favorites:

We were hoping to be on the front page of Hacker News all day, and we were!While we never cracked the top 3, we were hovering around #5 all day, got 331upvotes and 71 comments. Possibly the most exciting fact about our launch washow positive everyone on HN was! I’d like to give a special shout-out to Dan Gfrom HN, who gave us great tips on how to launch.

In approximate numbers, we had 20k new visitors this month, with the majoritycoming during the Show HN, but still a much higher baseline (300/ day) than wehad previously (50 / day). We had 250 users before our Show HN and gained 1000afterwards, so our total user base is 1250. We’re up to almost 200 in ourDiscord community, and the majority of those are post-launch but I don’t knowhow many.

We have about 100 users who have run code more than 30 times and another 100 whohave run code more than 10 times. This means we have about 1000 people whochurned off the product fairly quickly after signing up. This means we struck anerve with folks enough to give us their email, but we have a lot more to do tohelp them be successful with the tool.

New homepage, explaining Val Town & “vals”

Redesigned Val Cards, lots of small UI upgrades everywhere, uniform styles,icons

Reorganized the top-line navigation around Home / Explore / Tips

A new “Featured Vals” section on the “Explore” tab

Removed the “New Val” button in favor of always showing an editor for writinga new val

Added a “New folder” button

~50 tiny fixes, including major refactors to pay down tech debt

We encountered one medium-severity andone critical-severity security vulnerability. Weimmediately fixed the vulnerabilities and paid out bug bounties to thereporters. We are talking to Hacker One about setting up a more formal bugbounty program. We have also made it our #1 priority to switch to a more securesandboxed runtime (possibly Deno) for running user code. We hope to make theswitch in the next week or two.

We feel that the roadmap is fairly straightforward for us over the next coupleof months. The product has some rough edges we need to smooth out: sandboxing,janky semantics around mutable state, public vs private vals, val versioning,better documentation, etc. Although we know a lot about these problems, pleasekeep reporting them as you see them so we know which are the highest priority.We have a new #bugs forum channel inour Discord that we’d love to hear from you in!

There are some really exciting features many users have been asking for: npmimports, “backlinking” so you can see how your vals are used by others, OAuthfor instant access to common APIs like Twitter, GSuite, Discord, Slack, etc.

Please jump into our Discord if you have suggestions on how to make the productbetter.

Happy coding!

Steve

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