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 thumbnail doodle
Changelog — April 2, 2026
blog.val.town/changelog-04022026
"Talk of the Town" thumbnail doodle of an old fashioned telephone
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)
cover doodle for Val Town's 26th Newsletter, March 2026
cover doodle for party at the Val Town office on Thursday March 12th
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
it's working
📢 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: posthero.us/post/holiday-musing-fixi...
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...
Tom watching Meredith deleting all the evidence in Disclosure (1994)
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
random GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) quote Forget it, Venkman! get the whole script one line at a time by following @ghostbusters1984.bsky.social on bluesky
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)
