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Show HN: Val Town Projects

blog.val.town
by stevekrouse·1y ago·5 comments·view on hn ↗
Hello! We at Val Town have spent the last couple months redesigning our product around a new core primitive: Val Town Projects.

Why: Our prior core primitive, a "val", was too small. A val is just a single hosted JavaScript file. Users kept bumping up against rough edges managing lots of disparate vals.

What: A Val Town Project is a group of vals, files, and folders, versioned collectively. They support branches, forks, and merges.

How: We made the sacrilegious decision to not build on git. We instead built a simplified system that works directly in our postgres database.

Our dream is that Val Town Projects will unlock a new kind of collaboration, and we hope you all make amazing things with it!

5 comments
Been waiting for something like this to land in val.town for too long! Congrats to Steve and the team for shipping this.
Hey, I worked on this. I am the person who advocated for us not to use git and build our own thing instead. Happy to answer any questions or expound on my hopes and regrets!
Git has the advantage for the user, that there is no lock in effect, how about your approach :)?
Yes we do not have that. Hopefully if you're using Val Town you're getting a lot of out the interface and platform and this is just another api surface. If you want to pull your code and files and run them elsewhere that should be easy. Git sync to and from projects should be straightforward enough to implement (once we ship the public API) and our runtime is easy enough to replicate by running things with Deno directly.

This was definitely an "easier for us to run, good for the product experience" decision. Freedom comes elsewhere :)

Love Val.Town!