Ok: 1) vibe coding is pretty fun & ridiculous - you make unmaintainable slop super fast 2) @val.town is super fun for making quick & dirty DIY backends 3) @rideact.bsky.social desperately needs to efficiently cache their GTFS/RT data kuanbutts.com/actransit/
reworked the random Letterboxd watchlist picker (running on @val.town and @netlify.com now) and it's looking much nicer letterboxd-watchlist-random.netlify.app
BTW: I'm slowly assembling a LIVE Primer to help folk submitting to LIVE (& others) get the lay of the land. Please take a look and let me know what's missing, what sucks, what's rad, etc. live-workshop.github.io/primer/
Moved my first Glitch app to Val Town today. I set up a redirect from the old Glitch to the new Val and everything.
Last night, I gave a talk about AI, programming, & vibe coding www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WC8...
vals have multiple files! and folders! you can clone them locally! and use cursor! or vim! or townie! which itself is a val! which means it can edit itself! code search & our blog are also now vals! everything's a val! you get a val! you get a val! everyone gets a val!
mono-jsx just works on @val.town, no installation, no build, with signals π¦ www.val.town/x/ije/mono-j...
Wrote about the end of Glitch - the platform, the union, the dreams, and the technical debt that killed it all. Tried to keep it honest but not too spicy. Been gone a year now but felt like the community deserved some context π
New tutorial video: How to make a Harry Potter themed Todo App with Townie β basic user auth β backend persistence Featuring my new favorite phrase β "human brain" β four times! www.youtube.com/watch?v=6koO...
Great chatting with @stevekrouse.com and @charmaine.bsky.social about @val.town I even managed to coin a phrase too! βIf a picture paints 1,000 words; @val.town paints 1,000,000β Quick prototype toy apps that can be used and iterated on quickly allowing faster discovery.
Val Town is one of my favorite communities on the web, feels like a spiritual descendent of @glitch.com. And @macwright.com using it to build a modern version of ThinkUp, the app @ginatrapani.org and I worked on a decade ago? Iβm so moved! macwright.com/2025/05/16/t...
remember thinkup by @anildash.com + @ginatrapani.org? it was so cool, plugged into your twitter account and sent you updates when people updated their bios and more well, twitter sucks, bluesky has an api, time is a flat circle so i brought part of it back from the dead www.val.town/x/tmcw/blues...
i added user-provided boards last night using the new townie - gordwame.val.run/play/gordwame - gordwame.val.run/play/trythis...
What if Lovable, bolt, v0 were built in themselves? The new Townie is 100% open-source and is itself built on Val Town. (It can edit itself!) It's not for one-shot demos, but for building complex full-stack projects Code, prompt, branch, pull request Already always deployed
Continuing to have a lot of fun with Val town. Recommend highly if you want to get back to hacking stuff together the way the web was meant to be
How does someone go from a kid struggling at math, to loving math, to becoming a cloud computing innovator? For @stevekrouse.com it was an afterschool programming program. New podcast episode! corecursive.com/the-power-of...
π Some new features in our community showcase featuring: - www.autoblocks.ai - @dreww.gg's steam forum scanner - @geoffreylitt.com's stevens - @michaelschultz.com's eink frame - brad's val town x @notion.com demo
sometimes you just want to embed a val town user's profile pic, and in 24 lines of code, now you can! <img src="https://pic.val.run/stevekrouse" />
i love this roll-your-own-saas app vibe sometimes it's simpler to own a simple stack you 100% understand than to onboard to a fully-featured app
@val.town is legit so fun to make dumb little apps and tools and cronjobs with! its like if cloudflare workers was more friendly
π» New Open Source Project: @val.town MCP Server I built a bridge that connects AI assistants (Claude and others) to ValTown through the Model Context Protocol. github.com/PrashamTrive... 1/2
OK, made some progress on a forkable #atproto starter site hosted on @val.town! You can log in with OAuth and load some content from your account. Next up is lexicons! www.val.town/v/wilhelm/AT...
mcp is the most over-hyped thing in tech right now it's like the hype with openai tool-use a year ago, but 10x
val.town is a delightfully simple tool for writing hosted serverless functions, which makes it a perfect fit for handing Replicate webhooks. We wrote a little guide to standing up a simple API on Val Town that receives webhook events from Replicate and sends you email notifications. π§΅...
math is trippyyyyy! π€― taylor hodge's exponential sum plot generator, inspired by @johndcook.bsky.social
Pumped for this livestream with the brilliant @maggieappleton.com this Friday, 10am ET Maggie is a pioneer in the Future of Coding. So excited to show her the new @val.town Projects. Come join! www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVNG...
Itβs completely free, too! Iβm using pushover.net for the notifications, and val.town for the backend code. You can see the code here: www.val.town/v/samwho/not...
LIVESTREAM TOMORROW 9AM ET With @TodePond! Be there or be square www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH40...
this is your monthly reminder that if you don't use a maccy.app (or any clipboard manager) you're really missing out this reminder is brought to you by my annoyance whenever i see someone not have it installed and go copy things multiple times
This is a practice recording of a talk I gave last night at Developers, Developers, Developers If you're curious about the future of AI & devtools, and what we're doing about it at Val Town, take a watch :) www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFBf...
Idea for reality show: You can learn anything Guests show up with a skill they've failed to learn and feel is beyond them, be it calculus, how to hit a backend, how to draw, how to write well, how to code, whatever Then you learn that thing on the show
I'm looking for programmers to onboard to β¨ Val Town Projects β¨ to: β’ create a personal site or blog β’ full-stack app β’ backend β’ internal tool β’ or really anything you can do in js/ts π€ Who would like to be personally onboarded? DMs open :)
TIL the hard way that foreign keys in SQLite DO NOT automatically give you indexes In other news, cerebrascoder.com is now 10x faster
I run a small community and it's important I stay up on the limited number of conversations in this space. But monitoring topics on Bluesky is hard... Not any more! πβ¨ Now anyone can get a daily email of relevant conversations using the free Bluesky Phrase Tracker π www.val.town/v/panphora/b...
it is a bittersweet fact that one can always get better at something through effort the upside is that there is no ceiling the downside is that you have to climb the stairs to get a better view, and there's always a better view, and more stairs to climb
i made a free and hackable status page and uptime monitor, which will email you if your site has downtime it's a val town project, so you can fork it & have it running in seconds we just built forks and pull requests, so be one of the first ever to try them out! they're crazy fast!
made a pr to @bsky.app dev docs so anyone can instantly deploy a bot to val town π€ github.com/bluesky-soci... (if there are other open source docs/repos you love that you'd like me to do this for, lmk! want to make dev docs and starters amazing β¨)
Single File Web Apps: matthamlin.me/blog/2025/fe... @val.town allows for a pretty neat behavior where the server entrypoint can be the exact same module as the client entrypoint!
Brian Eno: βThe great benefit of sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement.β This, but for every medium.
I wrote a lilβ @val.town script to periodically check for spots in a class I'd like to take and email me if any sections open up!
