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Great question! A val is a small snippet of JavaScript/TypeScript that runs on our servers. You can also schedule them.

We're trying to make a new kind of web primitive, like a Tweet or a Github repo, or more pointedly, like a Github Gist, but one that runs.

5 comments

I assumed it was a play on "value town"?

I'll add a +1 to praising your (sadly rare) ability to actually explain what your product does on your product's landing page. I got it instantly from your tagline "If GitHub Gists could run And AWS Lambda were fun".

I can see myself using this for one-off scripts and personal stuff. Out of curiosity, is it intended for more than that as well?

Thanks!!

I originally called it eval town and called the units of computation evals, but my friend JP pulled a sean parker on me and told me to drop the 'e', and it became val town! It's short for 'eval' or 'evaluation' or 'value' as in a 'javascript value'. What's value town?

Really appreciate that you understand the value prop!

We want to be used for all sorts of compute one day, but want to start with lighter-weight things (think zapier for programmers or api prototyping) but one day scale to be a real aws or heroku replacement, but that's a long ways off

Will you be adding external triggers to run the vals? Eg. If I create a page in Notion x val should run.

What would be amazing is if i could also connect my Notion account to somebody else’s val so they could run the val using my credentials.

In a first-class way? Probably some day!

Today the way you can do it is either 1) polling for new things (scheduled vals make this really easy) or 2) creating a webhook with val town (also super easy if the service you want has webhooks).

Happy to help with either of these: email me at steve@val.town if you want to pair program or something :)

Yeah, that’s a feasible work-around.

I’m thinking the val author could require a Notion auth in order to run the val. Once I’m logged-in, the val can use my creds to make requests to Notion API on my behalf.

What would also be a amazing is to be able to configure custom inputs and show a UI to add/overwrite these input params before I run a val. I’m thinking similar to the forms feature in Google Colab

Our use case: we have some TypeScript scripts that we want to expose to our non-technical folks. Currently we share the scripts via GitHub and let them run them with Deno as CLI.

Thanks for your kind offer, btw.! We don’t have a urge right now, but will be more than happy to migrate our scripts to val, once there is a way to work around the points above!

Really love what you’re doing with val. We are big fans already and will be watching closely!

Great ideas! I am particularly enamored by the google colab forms - thanks so much for that pointer!

Yeah, I'd love to win that usecase away from github scripts + locally running via deno! One day!

One more thing: just tried the editor and one thing i’m already missing is GitHub co-pilot. Maybe there is a way to integrate co-pilot into val? Zed editor just did same very recently

Value town is when you make a chunky bet on the river with a fairly obvious hand and get that call from a decent 2nd best hand!

I feel compelled to tell you that your website explains your product and what I might use it for incredibly well. It's a surprisingly rate trait in a service/product marketing site.

Wow, thanks so much!

Any word on other language support? I kind of imagine a local hosted version quite similar to this being quite useful, and while this isn't locally run it's also quite cheap, so i wouldn't mind using it instead of local.

With that said, i'd still want to "use my own languages". My specific interest being Rust.

Our strategy is to go extremely deep into one language/ecosystem (JS/TS) and be able to provide extremely good tooling around it. The downside is that there won't be a Rust version any time soon, if ever.

I would make a plug for TypeScript though. It's a pretty fantastic language and while it's not Rust, I learned in my last startup that it's not that much slower than Rust, that much of the time: https://zaplib.com/docs/blog_post_mortem.html

Totally fair, appreciate the thoughts and answer!

Friendly feedback this background info is strangely missing from your "about" content.

Hmm, those sound unappealing to me. With Tweet it's controlled by the guy who's RTing disinfo, with GitHub it's stolen by Copilot.

A better "web primitive" would be something portable/federated.

The code by itself is portable by definition. This is just a container to run it. Otherwise, just put it in a github gist.