Val Town Newsletter 4

Steve Krouse on Mar 2, 2023

We’re almost done rebuilding our runtime on Deno! We also snuck in a dozen little projects and upgrades. We are overwhelmed by all the cool vals y’all are dazzling us with! We reached 100 users who have at least one scheduled val running 🤩

Changelog

New demo video

The last demo video was from September 2022, so it was high time for an update. It’s amazing to see how far the product has come since then! After a fairly awesome reception to our new demo video on Twitter, we decided to add it to the docs and our landing page.

https://www.loom.com/share/c075dc075909400a85591ac3f83d1ca5

Subdomains galore

We launched docs.val.town, blog.val.town and about.val.town!

HTML emails

Now you can send yourself HTML emails like it’s 1999.

console.email({ html: "<h1>hello!</h1>" });

Reorder your vals

Now you can drag your vals around in whatever order your heart desires.

Autocomplete for secrets

Screenshot 2023-03-02 at 11.54.43 AM.png

& much more

val evaluation is back to being 300ms or so. (Down from up to 2 seconds!)
profile pictures from github / gravatar
migrated from create-react-app to remix
types refresh between vals without having to refresh the page
all date, fetch, and random values are tracked (determinism ftw)
“About” menu with a contact email (hi@val.town) & link to blog
speedups to the frontend when you’re working with larger vals
we don’t go down every night anymore. we almost never go down now!

Now

It’s all hands on deck to get our new Deno runtime merged in ASAP. Maybe next week? Don’t hold us to it.

Rodrigo is working on lots of small design upgrades, including a much needed improvement to search. He designed a big upgrade to how our UI conveys the private/public-ness of vals (not yet implemented). He recently pushed a minimalist upgrade to our logo and landing page. We finally have a favicon! We’re focusing on small design improvements with outsized impact. And he’s also made the shift from mostly prototyping in figma to mostly prototyping in code directly!

I am apparently now a product manager, writing docs and tweeting, shuttling feedback from users back to the team, creating lots of github issues, and occasionally I get some time to grind out some little features and find bugs in our new Deno runtime.

Cool vals

Now we have a #cool-vals channel in our Discord. Go show off & give each other props! I am trying something new on this newsletter. Welcome to the wall of cool vals! (Best viewed on desktop.)

https://twitter.com/stevekrouse/status/1625565598229925915?s=20

https://twitter.com/stevekrouse/status/1630299064091770880?s=20

https://twitter.com/stevekrouse/status/1631331747748093959?s=20

https://twitter.com/tmcw/status/1631330968949727232?s=20

https://twitter.com/stevekrouse/status/1630965221094244353?s=20

https://twitter.com/stevekrouse/status/1630496379448487936?s=20

https://twitter.com/stevekrouse/status/1631332758407487489?s=20

That’s all for this newsletter. See you around town!

Steve

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