How I wrangle the many tools that we use to build Val Town

Write your scripts on the internet, from your terminal, or in any editor

Running the Deno LSP to make our TypeScript language tools dramatically better

Bring Val Town to work

Enriching users to find ideal customers

Code that nobody understands is tech debt

Townie is now pay-per-use

Mutli-file vals, local development, new Townie, new Search, and much more

Saying goodbye to a platform we admired

Vals are being upgraded to support multiple files, folders, and more

We migrated this blog to Val Town Projects

Val runs failed due to a database migration that was not backward compatible

Figuring out how to provide an API that's usable by everyone and fast for us to iterate on

Val Town Projects, Highlight to edit, Logs redesign, Public endpoints with private code, and much more

Dramatically increasing the scope of what you can build in Val Town, Projects are groups of vals, files, and folders, versioned collectively

Projects beta, Deno 2, Use cases, and more

Some vals experienced lockfile and React errors due to breaking changes in esm.sh

From GitHub Copilot to ChatGPT to Claude Artifacts, how Val Town borrowed the best of all the code generation tools

A single degraded host impacted certain Vals for some time.

Building a simple aggregate view of our codebase

Townie upgrades, Scoped API permissions, Fal partnership

Our experiences running LLMs in production

Improving security with granular control over permissions

Can we implement Val Town on Val Town?

Bringing lightning fast AI image generation to Val Town

Townie upgrades & faster HTTP vals

Meet Townie, our AI assistant that helps you ship apps fast

Townie AI, Faster vals, and Lockfiles

We donated $9,600 to open-source!

Adding lockfiles to Val Town for stability, security, and performance.

Like Claude Artifacts, but with a backend and database

Missing permissions-checking in our internal save endpoint

Taking advantage of our typed REST API to build a platform around Val Town.

Full-screen Editor, 5x faster HTTP vals, new Dashboard, improved Search, Townie redesign, Trending redesign, Profile filters, and more!

At Val Town we spawn a lot of processes. We're working on making it faster

We built a new runtime for HTTP vals that is up to 5x faster at scale

Why we’re using TypeBox instead of Zod for our server validation layer

How switching to Fastify let us embrace runtime and compile-time types

HTTP Streaming, Semantic Search, Townie AI Chat, and a TypeScript SDK

How to build semantic search with embeddings for Val Town within Val Town itself

Val Town supports HTTP streaming for streaming LLMs, large requests and responses, and server-sent events

Improved performance, redesigned val page, live coding, and much more!

Disclosure, mitigation, and next steps

A more understandable entry-point to Val Town

Our seed round, growing team, Codeium completions, @std/openai, and more

Searching code at scale without employing a search team is hard

We raised $5.5m to make programming fun, accessible, and collaborative.

Custom domains, Logs 3.0, Faster HTTP responses, Status page & much more!

From vm to vm2 to workers to processes, the long journey to how we run vals today

Not every function should be an API

Pull Requests, Val Editor Redesign, AI Suggestions, OSS Docs, New Astro Blog, Templates

Designing the core UI of editing

SQLite, Blob Storage, updates to how Vals are named, and more

Disclosing and fixing a recent security issue

An API that takes a Request and returns a Response - what was that, again?

Our move to embrace web standards

Product Hunt, v3 in development, and more

How to customize OpenAI to your liking

Hiring, podcasts, and more!

A year of Val Town!

Our REST API lets you do a lot - and soon it will enable more

A novel authorization scheme for Val Town

Increasing the security of Val Town by isolating domains.

Refactoring the core component of Val Town for better performance.

Announcing Val Town Pro

Our journey from Supabase to Postgres and Render

Moving off of Supabase and enhancing our security with restricted library mode

Evolving Val Town’s security model

Lots of little updates!

Shipping our Deno runtime

Rebuilding on Deno, HTML emails, and more

Expanding our founding team

Your monthly update of cool vals!

Replacing our sandbox in response to a security disclosure

Programmatic notifications, Hacker News API, and more.

A reflection on the goal of making programming for everyone.

Smarter typeahead, tutorials, much more.