Val Town Newsletter 20

Steve Krouse on

The newest version of Townie is incredible at writing vals. It creates deployed apps with a backend and database in seconds. Honestly, if you have five minutes, you gotta try it out!

We shipped a number of other improvements, including a huge speedup to vals, lockfiles to secure your code, the ability to receive email attachments, a new version history UI, and opened up support for hundreds more NPM packages.

Quick hiring update: we’re still looking for a couple more engineers to join our founding team in Brooklyn. If you have any brilliant friends in NYC, please send them our way!

There was such an overwhelming amount of amazing vals created this month that I had to build a custom tool to help me write the “community vals” section of this newsletter. You guys rock!

🤖 Townie AI

This month we released our third wholesale rewrite of Townie, and it’s incredible. It’s now able to generate full-stack applications with a backend and database in seconds. It’s like Claude Artifacts, with a backend.

If you want more Townie demos, I’m tweeting up a storm of them. If you want to know the backstory behind Townie, JP released an excellent blog post about how we prototyped Townie.

⚡️ Faster Vals

Vals now run way faster. You’ll see 2-10x speedups, depending on the context. We’re finally competitive with premier hosting providers. For example if you hit an HTTP val’s endpoint in NYC, you’ll often get a response in under 100ms. (Our servers are in Ohio. Multi-region is still a while off. Sorry Japan!)

This is thanks to our new load balancer, which:

  1. Routes around a slow part of our stack (more on this later)
  2. Directs traffic to where your val is already running, so you skip cold starts

Expect more improvements and a fuller blog on this shortly!

🔒 Lockfiles

We’ve introduced lockfiles in Val Town to enhance stability, security, and performance. When you save a val, a deno.lock file is generated, ensuring the same versions of dependencies are used in the future. This prevents issues caused by changing libraries and malicious dependencies, and improves performance by caching the dependency tree. Learn more in our announcement post.

Charts of requests to esm.town and worker initialization time decreasing

💸 We joined the OSS Pledge

We’re excited to announce that we’ve joined the OSS Pledge. We commit to donating at least $2k per year per full-time developer at Val Town to open-source. You can learn more in our announcement post. We donated have donated $9,600 so far in 2024:

ProjectWhat it doesAmount
esm.shCDN for ESM modules$1000
Sindre SorhusProlific open source maintainer$1000
tsxEasy way to run TypeScript directly$1000
FastifyWeb framework$1000
ZodData validation library$1000
UnifiedMarkdown transformation module ecosystem$1000
DrizzleDatabase query builder$800
CodeMirrorCode editor framework$800
Mock Service WorkerTesting helper modules$500
rcloneUpload and download files to S3 and more$500
HonoWeb standards-based web framework$500
huskyNice way to set up git hooks$500

🎉 Other updates

🛣️ Roadmap

Here’s some of the top features we’re planning to work in the coming months. Please make feature requests and vote on what you’d like to see next.

  • Continued Townie AI improvements
  • Rolling out HTTP (Preview) as the default HTTP val type
  • Continued performance improvements
  • LLM-generated READMEs

🌟 Community vals

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