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...

living rn

today i moved @countingsheep.bsky.social’s brain and soul from @glitch.com to @val.town

Huge shout out to friends @val.town - @stevekrouse.com @charmaine.bsky.social Love chatting with you folks! The cap is gonna be perfect for working outside this summer, and the stickers are going straight onto my next notebook! The chocolate may not have lasted long after this photo was taken…😃

The @vercel.com MCP adapter works with @val.town HTTP triggers (for streamable HTTP at least) meaning you can write and deploy MCP servers with TypeScript instantly, right in your browser!

have migrated the #nowplaying bots from @glitch.com to @val.town... next job is the the film script bots

i highly recommend checking out val town for your server side needs when migrating glitch apps. i already have been using it for a server to my static glitch sites

I had three Glitch sandpit websites for creative coding. I’m spinning up a blog just now and it’s fairly easy. Val town seems like a new home for a glitch users. 😻

vals have multiple files! and folders! you can clone them locally! and use cursor! or vim! or townie! which itself is a val! which means it can edit itself! code search & our blog are also now vals! everything's a val! you get a val! you get a val! everyone gets a val!

📰 Val Town Newsletter 25! So. Many. Product. Announcements. 🗂️ Multi-file Vals 🦾 New Townie ＞ Local development 🤝 Val Town for Teams 🔎 New Search 🏢 Val Town Hall 🌟 Community Vals Read it here 👉 blog.val.town/newsletter-25

Val Town has always been inspired by @glitch.com - they paved the way for zero-config instantly-edited websites. It's a bummer that what brought so many people joy and was a great community for diverse communities is coming to an end So: where does Val Town fit into this? blog.val.town/glitch 💜🐟

Great chatting with @stevekrouse.com and @charmaine.bsky.social about @val.town I even managed to coin a phrase too! “If a picture paints 1,000 words; @val.town paints 1,000,000” Quick prototype toy apps that can be used and iterated on quickly allowing faster discovery.

New tutorial video: How to make a Harry Potter themed Todo App with Townie ✅ basic user auth ✅ backend persistence Featuring my new favorite phrase – "human brain" – four times! www.youtube.com/watch?v=6koO...

Val Town is one of my favorite communities on the web, feels like a spiritual descendent of @glitch.com. And @macwright.com using it to build a modern version of ThinkUp, the app @ginatrapani.org and I worked on a decade ago? I’m so moved! macwright.com/2025/05/16/t...

remember thinkup by @anildash.com + @ginatrapani.org? it was so cool, plugged into your twitter account and sent you updates when people updated their bios and more well, twitter sucks, bluesky has an api, time is a flat circle so i brought part of it back from the dead www.val.town/x/tmcw/blues...

i added user-provided boards last night using the new townie - gordwame.val.run/play/gordwame - gordwame.val.run/play/trythis...

What if Lovable, bolt, v0 were built in themselves? The new Townie is 100% open-source and is itself built on Val Town. (It can edit itself!) It's not for one-shot demos, but for building complex full-stack projects Code, prompt, branch, pull request Already always deployed

Continuing to have a lot of fun with Val town. Recommend highly if you want to get back to hacking stuff together the way the web was meant to be