Can someone define "val"? I don't think that I've seen that, before.
We're trying to make a new kind of web primitive, like a Tweet or a Github repo, or more pointedly, like a Github Gist, but one that runs.
With that said, i'd still want to "use my own languages". My specific interest being Rust.
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
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
What would be amazing is if i could also connect my Notion account to somebody else’s val so they could run the val using my credentials.
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!
Yeah, I'd love to win that usecase away from github scripts + locally running via deno! One day!
A better "web primitive" would be something portable/federated.
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.