This comment thread was a nudge to push out a quick experimental change to the val.town landing page, so thank you. Very open to feedback on that messaging if anyone has any. Most customers these days ask about using val town with claude code, so you could also think of us as a deployment platform for vibe coded apps
Thanks! And btw I didn't perceive your comment as negative! More a helpful confirmation of what we've been thinking: "yeah, we have a messaging/positioning problem"
Hey, I work at Val Town, and we definitely struggle to describe what it is because the platform is so broad, but I'll try: a javascript code editor in the browser that auto-deploys that code to our servers whenever you edit a file. You can run code by clicking a button, on a cron, via HTTP. And there's other stuff like SQLite and blob storage
So yes, like Cloudflare Workers in some ways. Or like CodePen but fullstack. Or Replit. The val town "founding poem" was:
> You can change which resolver you use in your network settings. I switched to 1.1.1.1 on my machines - it's noticeably faster than my ISP's default resolver.
Noticeably faster as in just loading a website? Or in some script where small differences add up? I thought typical DNS lookup was sub 100ms, but I've never tried switching my resolver so I'm curious
This is a first draft blog post version of a talk I'm giving at a startup conference next week. I am looking for feedback.
Please comment here or reply on the blog itself if I got something wrong or you have something to add. Personal anecdotes and cited sources are great, but I'm also curious to hear end-of-the-bar opinions.
Oh cool, I didn't know about field-sizing. Thanks.
And yeah, this definitely set off my alarm bells like "maybe I shouldn't be using React here." I guess the initial goal was just getting something that works out there using the thing I know best (React), and the second phase could be a rewrite using a better tool for the job-open to any thoughts and suggestions on that.
I'm in the same boat with vanilla instead. I start with no dependencies and add some vanilla compatible libraries when needed. But when project size grows the friction makes me less motivated to continue. That's just what I know best and where I'm most comfortable since I control everything.
Unfortunately I don't have more specific suggestions, but just in case the verbosity of vanilla is a turn-off, I will namedrop Bliss.js.
Thanks. And yeah, I was talking to my roommate about enabling edits in the future. I guess the spirit of the site is letting each person do with it what they wish, so I suppose I should open up future dates for edits.
Thanks for pointing this out (all comments in this subthread). I just updated the date picker to only re-render the grid of weeks when the input is unfocused (onblur) and avoid the unnecessary intermediate updates. Still more work for me to address lag, but hopefully that helps.
Maybe I could add an export feature that downloads the data in a .csv or something. The URL storage is definitely a bit wonky, but more robust persistence felt like overkill (maybe I'm wrong about that, though!).
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