Val Town Newsletter 1

Steve Krouse

on

Jan 4, 2023

Welcome to the 1st Val Town newsletter!

By way of reminder, Val Town gets you fastest from idea to deployed cloudscript. Create scheduled functions, email yourself, and persist small pieces ofdata — all from the browser, with instant deploys, and never thinking aboutinfrastructure.

In the last three months (since the 0th Newsletter),we’ve gained focus around the product’s early use-cases, found a couplefantastic early adopters, shipped major features, grew the founding team, andare working on an exciting roadmap for 2023.

Our first challenge was finding use-cases for Val Town, while keeping it ageneric programming tool. After dozens of early-adopter conversations, stumbledonto programmatic notifications:

Poll some source of information via fetch (Hacker News, RSS feeds, Twitter,etc)If there are results, email them to yourself via console.emailSchedule it to run on an interval, like every hour

Most people can think of at least one kind of custom notification they’d like,and it takes just a couple of minutes to fork one of these to suit yourpurposes.

The Hacker News Agolia Search API is free andunauthenticated, so it’s really easy to make queries. We made a tutorial aroundit, but it was mostly ignored until Kartik taughthimself JavaScript to get it to work for him! We then built a whole websitearound it (hnfollow.com) andlaunched it to Hacker News. Wemade the front page, got a couple dozens users, and then wereremoved from the front page,because Val Town “is much more interesting than an HN email alert.” The launchof Scheduled Vals has made this even easier (probably deprecating hnfollow.com).Now you can setup HN Alerts by forking a single val:

RSS has been making a comeback, particularly since the mess at Twitter.James mentioned that he has a RSS to email Zapier Zap,and it got me thinking that this is something Val Town would really excel at.This is where the idea for Scheduled Vals came from, as a generalization of HNFollow, but packaged up in a single val. Of course, we can’t compete againstfull RSS readers, but if you simply want an email notification for a new post inan RSS feed, I think we’re compelling. I put all mine in an object and thenlooped over them.

Ernest programmed a function to get notifications when there are new citationsto a particular scientific paper.

Lev programmed a bot that helps folks in SanFrancisco know when they should close their window due to poor air qualityduring fire season.

Of course not all notifications need to be run on a schedule. Some notificationscome in the form of webhooks, like from Stripe, your app, database, or reallyanywhere. Val Town is quite good at turning an HTTP request into an email toyourself. For example, I get emailed when anyone signs up to Val Town or certainerrors occur.

There are so many other exciting similar use-cases. Once you start thinking ofthem, it’s hard to stop:

Email notifications when certain folks post on Twitter or certain keywords arementionedNotifications when any asset you own changes price by a large % suddenlyI’ve long wanted to rebuild Devon’ssmallworld.kiwi in Val TownMorning alert if it’s going to rain that day or if you need to wear sunscreenA “subscribe to thread” twitter bot that will notify you when a thread getsnew subtweets (if you @mention it like you would “@threadreaderapp unroll”)

What are you waiting for? Go setup your own programmatic notifications! If youwant company while you code, free toschedule time to pair program with me toset these up. It’s super useful for me to watch folks use the tool.

A big focus for this year is doing a better job of blogging and celebrating eachproduct improvement as they happen. Given that we didn’t do this over the lastthree months, here are the highlights!

Our initial interface for creating intervals was simply Javascript’ssetInterval, but made persistent. The downside was that you had to keep trackof your interval IDs and be careful about starting, editing and deletingintervals. Now we have a one-click interface for creating & editing intervalsthat are automatically attached to vals.

We’ve rolled out TypeScript by default to all vals. It won’t prevent you fromrunning code with type errors, but will give you (hopefully) useful type errors,even without adding any annotations.

We now save every single evaluation of every val, be it a function or piece ofstate, no matter how it’s triggered. It’s been a great aid to debugging, and wehave big dreams for where we can take observability in the future(replayability/omniscience). You can see evaluation history on the pages of valsthathttps://blog.val.town/_astro/screenshot_2023-01-03_at_55022_pm.Dm9OlMfZ_12A5mx.webp.png" loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/_astro/screenshot_2023-01-03_at_55022_pm.Dm9OlMfZ_12A5mx.webp">

You can click into an evaluation to see its inputs, outputs, logs, emails, anderrors. We also let you explore its parent evaluation and any sub evaluations,which is like jumpihttps://blog.val.town/_astro/screenshot_2023-01-03_at_55146_pm.DhtglC8f_ZH3qOM.webp3-01-03 at 5.51.46 PM.png" loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="/_astro/screenshot_2023-01-03_at_55146_pm.DhtglC8f_ZH3qOM.webp">

We had a janky version of “notebooks” before, but we really needed a proper wayto organize your vals. Nobody felt this more than I did with my 1000+ vals. Youcan now move vals into folders, recursively!

By popular demand, there is now a special, safe place for you to put yoursecrets, API keys, and auth tokens. You can find this page by clicking yourusername (in the top-right corner) or by going tohttps://www.val.town/@me.secrets.

Automatically retry fetch requests when they fail before even connecting,all from randomly assigned residential proxies, virtually eliminating a verycommon class of error.Val are either functions or a single statement. However now if you write aseries of statements, we will detect it, wrap it in a function, and call thatfunction for you.We added more versatility in ways to pass arguments via the API, including anExpressJS API. (But we need better docs on this.)Rebuilt the architecture for running intervals and timeouts for reliability.Added (mostly accurate) line numbers in error messages.Built a more intuitive UI for logging in and out.We sped up a number of slow queries, some by14,000x.Added & then removed in-app chat.Added dozens of tests.

The founding team is coming together!

Steve Krouse (me)André Terron, engineering, joined in Oct, andshipped many of our biggest new featuresRodrigo Tello, design, whose first day wasyesterday 🥳& potentially one more in engineering!

We built a lot in the last ~4 months the company has existed, but I can’t waitfor what we will accomplish as a team of three or four.

We have raised a small amount from a single investor who instigated this projectand is aligned with the kind of company we want to build: a trusted contributorand partner to open-source and the ecosystem, valuing open-standards andcredible exit, and leavingusers in a good place no matter what happens to the company.

This essay on End-Programmer Programming isprobably the closest thing we currently have to a company mission statement.

The focus for 2023 is product and growth: making our scripting tool very fun anduseful, and getting lots of folks using it.

I think the product as is, modulo a bit of polish, could be useful to 10-100xmore folks than are currently using it (~10), so our initial focus this yearwill be gearing up for many more users. We need to get better at some of thetoo-often-overlooked sides of developer tools: docs, stability, polish, releasenotes, public issue tracking, error tracking, logs & analytics, more automatedtests, open-sourcing more pieces of the product, more tweeting about the product& celebrating what folks are doing with it, etc. There are a lot of otherlow-hanging fruit to enable growth, such as being able to try the productwithout creating an account, pretty share preview links, and improvements aroundfriction areas, such as editing functions (with confidence that you won’t breakdownstream references) and useful notifications when your functions do throwerrors.

I don’t like to plan too firmly, because I’m a big believer in being surprisedby what users do with the tool and what they want from it, but my personalinstinct is that the next big feature effort we’ll add (maybe in Q2) is buildingin first-class OAuth flows into your favorite tools, so you don’t have to wastetime with authenticating to do Zapier-like automations in Val Town.

Be sure to jump into our Discord to share tips,bugs, feature requests, and show off your work!

If you want to pair program on a project in Val Town, please don’t be shy! Justreply to this email orfind a time on my calendar.

Steve

steve@val.town

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