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?
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
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 :)
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!
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
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.
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
From the website: "Vals are small JavaScript or TypeScript snippets of code, written in the browser and run in our servers. Create scheduled functions, email yourself, and persist small pieces of data — all from the browser."
These use cases confuse me. If I needed to schedule an email to myself, why wouldn't I just run a simple local node server with my JS function on my home computer?
I'm sure it's a failure of my imagination but I'd just love to have more salient "ah ha!" example use cases of this platform.
Ever since hearing about TablePlus (here), I've been using it for side projects. I tried to introduce it at work but the lack of Oracle support in the windows client was an issue.
