val.town

Presenting... Talk of the Town, October 2026 edition *Playing with Jev & home-cooked transit dev* feat. @jim-nielsen.com, @nicobaier.com, @mootari.social, @paulchinjr.bsky.social, @marianoguerra.org, @cheersderek.com, @puf.io, @stevekrouse.com, @petemillspaugh.com, and dozens more

I wrote about trying (and failing) to let ai write for me title is a riff on @henrikkarlsson.bsky.social's henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query

warmed by people finding me at events to talk about how they loved glitch and expressing that nothing has fully replaced it - but at least for the “having a good time getting an app built and online (and remixable) without needing an aws account“ part, though, @val.town is still so great

launched 'access', a new @val.town feature that lets you restrict access to http endpoints and we handle all the auth particulars. glorious illustration by @jxnblk.bsky.social blog.val.town/access

we migrated the @val.town docs to val town, which was full of AX/DX/UX tradeoffs (to borrow @jim-nielsen.com's framing) anthropomorphized potato pothole doodle by @jxnblk.bsky.social

been spending a lot of time identifying & fixing security issues at @val.town: here's how it's going blog.val.town/security

a couple weeks ago, we got a “personalised” video pitch from a startup, but the guy in the video was not a person at all

for the company blog on @val.town: vals now get access to scoped blob storage so they can store binary data and avoid conflicting with each other blog.val.town/scoped-blob-...

Coming to a terminal near you

after wiring up blog.val.town yesterday, made a remixable blog template on @val.town that integrates with @standard.site!

integrated the @val.town blog with @standard.site :) our blog doesn't have a build step, so I vibe coded (in "slow mode" 😉) our own atproto publishing pipeline: val.town/x/valdottown/blog/branch/main/code/atproto/README.md

Lately, in town: - redesigned core val UI - deploying your combobulated (claude) code - new Pro pricing (only for new users) - ...and more blog.val.town/changelog-05262026

Tiny service for @firehose.club relay operators, running on @val.town

Slow Mode blog.val.town/slow-mode

Talk of the Town, May '26 blog.val.town/talk-of-the-town-may-26 Community vals feat. @tijs.org @paul.kinlan.me @k7d.dev @sri.xyz @marianoguerra.org @alex.mcroberts.me @jennschiffer.com @kamalnrf.bsky.social @nicobaier.com @raymondcamden.com @joshbeckman.org and more!

just published an essay on the @val.town blog: *Code is inert. Val Town makes it ert* blog.val.town/code-is-inert inspired by this sentence in @ftrain.bsky.social's "What is Code" essay 11 years ago > Code is inert. How do you make it ert?

I built an app that helps me keep on top of Hacker News. hn-push.val.run hosted on the awesome @val.town Let's you get real time updates to posts, comments and user's changes and you can get them delivered by Web Push Notification too. Check it out and I'd love some feedback.

experimenting with a video walkthrough of the (new) val town changelog, out yesterday www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtqa...

Changelog — April 2, 2026 blog.val.town/changelog-04022026

Talk of the Town, March 2026 blog.val.town/talk-of-the-town-mar-2026 (w/ video walkthrough: youtube.com/watch?v=mKXoAVVrlXc) Feat. an "NYC doorman" val, literally calling vals (as in "call a function" but also "call your mother"), a millennial-core quiz about recycled tech hype, and lots more

✈️ LGA → YYZ → YVR → #atmosphereconf (assuming i make all these flights and tsa is operating)

Our newsletter is back with the first edition since last summer: blog.val.town/newsletter-26 If it's been a while since you've visited val town, you can read this to catch up on what we're up to...and to rsvp to our party tomorrow :)

demo: ejecting to @val.town

this was fast! @val.town is cool

First everyone on @bsky.app gets a small database. Now every Val on @val.town gets a small database. Who’s next?!

new thing at @val.town - every val gets a database! plus a database browser / ui. blog.val.town/scoped-datab... maybe the coolest part: if you fork someone's val, you get a copy of the database schema.

we rebuilt @val.town's ai agent from scratch for the 5th time, and it's pretty great! would love any feedback :) blog.val.town/townie-v5

My latest obsession has been optimising webhook events from Ghost to Netlify. I needed a way to filter out large payloads sent to Netlify. Using @val.town as a webhook middleware, I can strip payloads and skip triggering builds for certain posts. jonathanyeong.com/writing/usin...

To start 2026 I officially joined @stevekrouse.com, @macwright.com, and co. at @val.town as a programmer-writer, part-time while I continue writing my book :) Val Town's founding poem is still my favorite way to describe what it is: > If GitHub Gists could run > And AWS Lambda were fun

📢 Introducing The Val Town MCP Server Bring Val Town to your favorite LLM – Cursor, ChatGPT, Zed, wherever! AI coding, instant deployments, built-in SQLite For example, here we use Claude Code to make a blog in a couple prompts Learn more & get started 👉 blog.val.town/mcp

i wrote everything that i've been kind of nervous to write about @val.town: here's how things have been going the last three years, and read to the end for how we're hiring for two people macwright.com/2025/11/11/v...

recommitted to @opensourcepledge.com at @val.town for 2025! very pumped to support projects like zod, fastify, codemirror, unified, and esm.sh with real 💸 as well as positive vibes. blog.val.town/oss-pledge

i'm hiring a 'growth engineer' to work side-by-side with me at val.town in brooklyn we're a small team on a mission to spread the joy of programming we're looking for someone self-directed, loves talking to users, write english & typescript, and own projects end-to-end if this is you, reach out!!

(my new job at @val.town is editing the blog) we launched a cli, called vt! you can run it in watch mode and it'll auto-deploy every time you change a file in your project, and you can use claude code, codex, or whatever the hottest new ai tool of the day is blog.val.town/vt-cli

this is tom on the company account retweeting tom on the personal account, devrel maxing, read the post, it's good

this summer @val.town had an intern, and he was truly kickass: read about how @404wolf.bsky.social put the @deno.land LSP server in a cloudflare container, made it speak websockets, wired it up to codemirror, and made the whole thing scale: blog.val.town/vtlsp

building a code editor in the browser is hard huge kudos to @404wolf.bsky.social for making ours so good this work is open-source, so you too can have amazing autocomplete, type information, go-to-definition, in your codemirror editor

🔴 LIVE TODAY: Realtime API deep dive w/ Justin Uberti (Head of Realtime AI at OpenAI, WebRTC creator) ⏰ 4pm ET / 1pm PT 📍 Livestream link to come! We'll walk through the new API and share code samples so you can start building with it right away.

Release notes: - Mic access now works in the HTTP preview iframe (We did this for @juberti's OpenAI Realtime Demo) - Flag users or vals for moderation - 🤫 Easter egg: every val.run val also lives at val.howright now, on our next gen infra!

🎉 Announcing Val Town for Teams Companies like PostHog, Kilo Code, Stainless, Scalar are using Val Town to automate technical GTM / growth workflows. Reach out or share this if you, or someone you know is interested 💖 HAPPY BRING YOUR VAL TOWN TO WORK DAY!! (This was such a long time coming)

📝 New blog post: Holiday musing: fixing stuff on prod I love Val.town for building little experiments and getting them hosted quicky. The fact that you can instantly have a URL to run code is incredible. I use... Read more: https://posthero.us/post/holiday-musing-fixing-stuff-on-prod

I built an email-to-blog blogging system, much like Posterous from back in the day. It supports publishing to RSS, ActivityPub, BlueSky and pings via WebSub. posthero.us If you want your own you can fork it here: www.val.town/x/paulkinlan...

all my apps gone! from @glitch.com that is. have finally migrated them all (the good ones anyway) - bluesky bots → @val.town - express/fastify websites → netlify functions & htmx - also archived some express websites to static html (spidered using wget) that didn’t need server code any more

here's a "random line from Ghostbusters" page cheersderek--9108146d0d48480a9e4ed4e93e5cf857.web.val.run testing out SASS and other front-end things on @val.town (thanks for the help @stevekrouse.com)

it's me I'm Juicy Bear

I made a @val.town because the IRS doesn't want to send me a notification about 501c3 approval. It checks every couple of hours and sends an email when the org finally shows up in search. www.val.town/x/dpip/nonPr...