Supper Club × val.town with Steve Krouse

I feel like you you gave me so much to talk about and so much to reply to. So, I I But but over time, we do wanna

persisting that data that were just cron jobs,

That's a lot to get up and running.

emailing yourself as easily as you'd lock to the console with console dot email,

This is something that we're probably moving away from, but right now, you can import someone else's vales easily as you you would tag them on Twitter. So at Steve Krauss dot foo, and then Foo is just evaluating your code, started building prototypes and doing research, and I kept

when you're trying to integrate that into your application because you there's there's so many things to think about. You gotta think about

we're actively debating internally whether or not we should do kinda like what Purcell did with Upstash So first, I wanted to build better dev tools for kids, and then it turned out that kids don't want better dev tools. Kids want to do adult programming, wall and CPU time? Yeah. So wall time is the total time of hours running.

referencing your own referencing vows, like importing That transition is so hard. That's part of why I'm passionate about building better developer developer tools because it's like that gulf between how easy it is for kids to get started with Scratch and how hard it is For them to do

an account on those platforms and just give you database But I found this product, called SwitchBot. They they they sell a lot of these bots,

And I think that's about it for, like, the the inbuilt primitives. The email thing is really cool because that's that's always such a a hurdle,

there's there's an API for that as well.

how do you avoid people abusing

And we're thinking very seriously about adding console dot SMS to text

So it's amazing that you just have that. Like,

Any Vowel, immediately had is accessible via API like its own API.

is the best thing ever because

What like, there's like so many pieces to sending a simple email.

what package are you gonna use for SMTP?

Sometimes when you're writing, someone who writes lots of quick scripts,

literally variables are persistence. And you could you could just make a set, Right? Or a map and and be able to to store stuff in there.

So Okay. So you you can't so you can't abuse it by emailing other people. So that's how we solve that problem.

From Valtown and throughout the MPM Deno community, for all of the extensions for his

So, I guess I'm preaching to the choir here. I I think Python is silly. Like, everyone should learn JavaScript as their first language, But, Redis or at me dot Upstash, and you just go ahead and shove data in it. Does it just work, and you don't even have to sign up for these other services,

how you're gonna render the thing, how are you going to,

yourself. And but, you know, you'll we'll make you verify your phone number so you can only text yourself.

is sometimes really frustrating. And the fastest Thing to do is to grab, like, a key value store that will persist it in, like, a local local text file or or somewhere, you know, You don't have to make a schema or anything like that. And that's really nice with the Val town because

right now, the there are, like, a lot of limitations to Vowel variables and what we can persist. Right now, it's just JSON. So, like, a map and a set, yeah, Val Town is very coding first, but we want it to, At the end of the day, feel so currently so so back to your question of, like,

And then But I I so,

valid JavaScript and that hold us back in certain web standard y ways. So we'll we'll probably keep the

You you could encode those into JSON and parse them back, if you wanted to. Yeah.

we'll we'll rewrite that to a a More web standard JavaScript import. So, anyways, there, in terms of primitives, we have APIs, we have referencing and importing

That as well as, like, are people trying to mine Bitcoin in Valve?

Mhmm. And there are a couple different APIs. There's an API for just evaluating arbitrary code. There's an API,

that we're we're working through. Oh, you you should totally make it work. At least the the vow persistence

So but but that's that's this limitation and this weird duality between But at the end of the day, It's a in browser

Vows that you've written or other people have written, that is,

we're we we think there's this this tension, Mainly for security reasons and also for yeah. I guess security reasons was the main reason, which is really wonderful and a magical experience. We're probably moving to a place that's more web standard. Like, as you as you probably know, the ad symbol is not,

And then you gotta, like, sign up for a service, and then you have to also set up your d mark d and all those, like, things on your domain name. It's just like, oh, man. Like,

or do we just play well with them and have you sign up for them, like, normal accounts? So that that there's a attention there, and and we're not sure sure what to do about it. We're like, we wanna get really good at helping you use any API. And then some APIs like email or text messaging, particularly yourself, we kinda wanna build that in. And so, like, for example, storage.

I got my start Teaching not kids, but, I got my start with something called ladies learning code.

and

Thank you. Let's see. So my background, Start, taking up some of the use cases that you'd normally send to AWS Lambda, is shaped like a hexagon. So you know that its return type is a hexagon, And its 2 inputs are also hexagons, so it takes 2 2 booleans. And then an if statement, So so that's,

way to

Get all close and personal with all the bad things, in programming languages, all the ways that people get confused that we forget about because we do it every day. Yeah. They got it got me even more passionate about, programming languages and building tools for making, you know, people less confused and less frustrated. The coding space seems really cool. I I just put some notes with maybe we'll talk about that later on in the episode because, Like, we're really

and I got like, just for people listening, I I wanna give the context

So give us the rundown. What is Valtown? Why did you build it? Valtown is a social website to write and run code.

20 years now, since I was a kid. So I guess that's kinda where my story starts. I went to this really cool after school program that taught me to code.

you built this Val Town thing, and I really like it as we both have a bit of a a teaching background.

Yeah. It's called the coding space. We taught kids here in New York City, after school, at people's houses, And, ever since then, I've been obsessed with programming languages On our our website, we have a poem.

Yeah. It it was a wonderful experience. As as you know well, like, teaching programming is a really wonderful into programming languages.

And it's just it's incredibly rewarding, and I I really like it. Maybe that's why

and,

I guess, I've been programming for maybe

but nobody yeah, right now,

in milliseconds. And then but then if you wanna evaluate a function then I

at, like, you know, A lot of times, we also want that to be fast. The all the other functions of the service platforms are much more optimized for the latter use case where you're, like, upload a zip file, They deploy it. Yeah. It might take it might take seconds or minutes, and then it's fast, and and that doesn't work for us. So, anyways, maybe one of those Platforms will eventually work for us, but right now, we have to do ourselves. So so you guys literally just, like, store the Vowel the coding as my like, you know, I I do wanna teach kids to code so that they can do things with computers. That's awesome. But in some ways, to me, that's almost the, with a piece with a new vow that someone in the community made. That is inspirational.

here you are running this cool thing. Like, I'm on render as well,

I I don't know about for forever, but definitely for now, we, we, like, we know all the platforms that run code as a service, like, including, you know, deploy, platform workers, Lambda. Yeah. We'd love to use those instead of maintaining the service ourselves, What are you using there? The code mirror 6. Pretty pretty solid.

Pull it out and pass it to Eval? Basically. Yeah. Wow. That's awesome.

or, we We will soon make you pay for it. There are some things we we we will make you pay for today and some things we will make you pay for tomorrow, and we're just giving you fair notice. Oh, this is the This podcast is a playbook on how to start something. Freaking get a couple of render servers, And then by learning logo, I became good at math. And I knew they were related even as a kid. And then as a as a College kid, I read Seymour Papert's writing, and it turns out it was all on purpose. He was just trying to design a Trojan horse programming language To make children good at math through learning to code without them realizing that he was trying to make them good at math.

Running a node server, and I'm a big fan of it. So it's cool to hear that. Yeah. I was even surprised that our front end server is And what's the idea behind

That's that's really cool to hear that. Like, You think everybody's going serverless. You know? And, That you can just start visiting and start posting data to and and start

It's just, You know, like,

And what about database? What are you using? Render Postgres.

so far. We we would love to, And I still am inspired by those folks and, think there's a lot of potential there.

Yeah. Straight press knows how to you know, one thing they really they it Code Academy launched? Like JavaScript was like the only thing they had. And that was like they did get some pushbacks. Like, why is it just JavaScript here?

just from his blog, Kind of like as a full time job almost, like podcasting about them. That's what the future of coding podcast is about. And so if you're interested in that whole world of dev tools and And then and it and it's infinitely composable. Like, tweets And then our, or any other code code execution platform. Today, Our scalability is, like, no and reliability is nowhere near those. So if you, like, have a have a true production workflow, we're not the right place for that today, But, we wanna get there one day. I I said I was showing Scott this right before the the podcast, and I was like, it's this is kind of like if this, then that I think. I

place you go to learn about those things or or books or anything?

Read his essays and essays he refers to and other essays that are related,

in general, is that something that you you spend time on learning? Is there a particular

I don't know if if you guys have heard of Brett Victor, or your listeners have, but he's,

And mathematics in general, I would yeah. Definitely recommend Seymour Papert's books.

But, yeah, besides those books, I would I'd definitely just head over to the future of coding. We have all the links there,

I deleted it. It's the

j s, and it was like a a real time board where anybody could input. Right?

And, like, within seconds of showing the audience, people were trying to Inject or trying to get around it or, you know, mess with it. Another follow-up question I had would be, the is it just maturity of, Educational experience. Is that future of coding .org?

Programming languages and and the future and the history of them all, I'd recommend the podcast. I'd recommend the community.

Yeah. Bread Victor is is a great place to start. Also, Alan Kay is a great great place to start. At least those are some of my favorites. Awesome. I I you kinda talked about this, but I'm I'm curious to hear what your straight up answer is. If you had to start coding from scratch, text in the database,

I I still laugh at the,

So okay. So, another big part of my philosophy like, a long running instance on a server somewhere, Or are you using, like, serverless Deno, Deno Deploy? What what does that look like? Yeah. We're just running we, so our whole stack, Front end, API server and Deno evaluation servers all run on render, which I've heard you guys talk about on the Oh, wow. Platform before. Yeah. Mhmm. And, and yeah. So we run our own Deno evaluation servers,

Yeah. Yeah. So, and the long term vision for, like, Yeah, to get to that, the web standard response So we're like, have you schedule your own drip marketing campaign? And, obviously, you can unscheduled it, as as soon as you want.

Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, things always go, and so we, yeah, we, like, need to Be the best tool for playing with, and then we need we but we also need to scale to real real use cases. Yeah. That you don't wanna be the there's some other company like that where We Like, reimplementing and, like, going down paths that people had already gone down, like, decades ago. And so I I kinda switched gears into doing research.

That was kind of a that was, like, the the the original

UI researcher he's kinda hard to describe it. UI researcher from Apple. He has his own website. His current project is called Dynamic Land.

Alan Kaye,

That makes sense. I have a couple of, supper club questions that are off the, Yeah. Off the cuff. Board. Something that off the cuff here. Yeah. Just from our our conversation, I had some really,

Unguarded

There are a lot of links there that that point you to places. Brett Victor even is the guy who got me on to Seymour Papert.

some questions for you specifically. You seem to have, like, a really good knowledge of programming history,

the very first JavaScript meetup I went to. They did a a demo of Meteor

I I made this one joke that my career is a Brett first search,

Yes. Cool. I'll make sure we get that linked up. Another question,

And the was so right now, you can only email yourself.

moment of how I got back to that, like, childhood I guess I have 2 jokes for you here.

I goal in mind, and it was and that needed to be done in a totally different language. I was like, what what are we we even talking about here? Like Mhmm.

So

There's a clear progression, that I've been building for children. Wes, do you have anything else, or do you wanna get into the supper club Questions. Yeah. Let's get into the the supper club. I'm just fixing my Val town because I somebody is abusing it now.

Yeah. Straight press.

is there any particular programming books? Because you've stuff here, they took The how do you make something feel

mentioned a small matter of programming, but is there any other programming books that you'd recommend people check out?

talks and essays that I that I highly recommend to anyone.

is that people will write 4 loops. Surprisingly, nobody has written anything awful yet, which is Shout out to our community.

the downside of giving people an input

like a a work of art kind of as a book or or whatever? I have a couple of Stripe press, and, man, what a cool platform.

It's So when you're making a request to g two v four, we're you're not paying CPU time for that because, you know, You you've awaited, and you've ceded control of the CPU back to other people's compute. That's that's a very good explanation of it. I like, we just have these questions of, like, what are what's the web standard? Like, when when we support JSX, what does it Do like, do we do we use the TypeScript pragma syntax to, like, let you specify if it's react or preact?

production things on it.

And a Val is just a function that can run when somebody hits it.

for coding,

it's A lot it's hobby projects. It's demo projects. And, was,

I quickly, before this podcast, Yeah. I think there's a YouTube video on the, like, the home page, and I I didn't even watch the whole thing. I watched probably the first half of it, and I kinda I was like, okay. I I understand what this is. If you need to run a piece of code

where it's like I guess it's not I guess it could be event based and whatnot. But like you said, it was Zapier is probably even better example.

in that. So is it mostly For demos and hobby projects, are people running

created a

In the long term or in the even in the medium term, we do want people to be doing to running

It's also A lot like AWS Lambda. So maybe somewhere in between those 2 things.

real real production things on it? Great. Yeah. That's a really good question. So Yeah.

So in that in that sense, it's a lot like.

and you don't wanna mess with Zapier's interface.

Val.

So to give people some context into, like, what it is,

Today, we're we're we're rolling out, like, a More full featured API to let you, like, read your vals, like, list your vals, and, what that looks like in other other more, like, serious data stores because our our data store is really just meant for these little scripts like you were talking about. It's, like, so great to just, like, shove some data somewhere, And it's there. Amazing. Val Tan, we can handle that. But, like, when you want a serious data store, what's that off ramp story? And and that's I guess, in a lot of ways, that's, like, the story of Val Tan. We're we were built for hobbyist, One of the best and most influential essays I read was, in this book called, A Small Matter of Programming by Bonnie Nardi. I think it's the 1st chapter of that book where she does a deep dive on how syntax actually isn't that hard to learn. It's like a miss, in my research, where I originally started was much more no code or low code.

Valetown really should be the best at those sorts of things if you're a programmer,

Yes. Yeah. TMCW.

We'll link it up in the show notes. Nice. Alright. Last section we have is

the sick picks and shameless plugs.

I I can't, how you liking Remix? We like it. We like it. Yeah. There are, like, just, like, 1 or 2 platform bugs that we were annoyed with, but but on the whole,

Like and they they wouldn't Go for that. So the first thing I tried was I put a lockbox on the outside of my door, and they hated that. They were like, you gotta get rid of this thing immediately.

because, like, I call this the karate syndrome. Like, A lot of people are like, you know, wanna learn karate. It's like, what does that even mean?

instead of trying to, like, integrate or replace something, sometimes the best Solution is to literally just tack something on top of Yeah. You're old school version. Yeah.

Yeah. I agree. What yeah. I remember when, Was

that that was a radical take 5 years ago. 5 years ago, parents

What about

So

What are your motivations? Are you trying to get a job? Are you just curious? Is there something very specific you're trying to build?

kept complaining to me, like, why are you teaching my kids Python? We we keep making little prototypes to, like, help with quality of life because we don't want you concatenating

Yeah. Especially if you're renting or in a condo or something like that, You're not allowed? Shameless plugs. What do you got for us today?

Hey. And, everything's connected on Fal Town. Right?

Tweet? Yes.

I I someone was, like, going on with this whole thing he wanted to learn,

Like, You can just Mhmm. You're just learning syntax. Like, I've I've totally isolated syntax to be, the only thing you have to focus on when you transition from scratch to woof. You just get to learn JavaScript syntax, how to call functions,

get to do his,

TMWC, For generic kid, I built a program, And Valtown is trying to go after that. We're And we're trying to make JavaScript into a little Vowel values are are a lot like variables. And, like, during a Vowel function execution, you can use it just like a JavaScript value. But at the end of the day, We we serialize to Jason and back, and then it that leads to some unexpected behavior. We also have size limits to these things.

that, like, Scratch is the way to go. You you're starting you're starting to make video games and animations right from the get go. That's that's awesome.

because Amjad, who started Replit, Worked at Codecademy. It was one of their 1st employees, and he built maybe their 1st employee. He built the, the edit the, like, the REPL in Codecademy, Like, I don't know if it if it, Like, gains us anything to put our API server on Dino as well. Mhmm.

But I think that worked out for them. I was gonna throw in a fun computer trivia fact. Valtime is similar to Replit, and they they were the sponsor of my podcast, and I did some work Yeah. Have them near your users.

so I So by by usage, I think IoT might be one of the the highest, 2 boxes on render. Like, you know,

that JavaScript should be the first language. Absolutely.

But And I I think that'll only be more and more true,

that you can install, Computer history. Oh, it's called Dream Machines. It's a it was put out by Stripe Press. Also, it's a good audiobook. That's a really good comprehensive history.

Don't like carrying keys.

Did you come prepared with a stick pick today? I did. I did. It took took me a while to come up with it, but there is this new product in my life that causes me So much joy, and I haven't been able to get any of my friends to start using it. And so maybe someone in the show will will take me up on it. They're, in some ways, it's hard to describe what Valten is because it's so generic, and it can do so many different things.

Tom McRight?

which which spun out to be it kind of spun out to be roughly. So, anyways Oh, interesting. The world is more connected than you'd think. Yeah.

What kind of coding like things have you done? Have you done Excel? Have you done Python? Did you take any classes? That probably, if I were to pick 1 place, is most directly a Unison idea, let's see. Yeah. I worked at a couple startups, Like, code is represented by an ID. In Unison, it's like the hash of the contents of the value. So So it's, like, hash based, like IPFS style and Neon. Like, as soon as you sign up for Val Town, do we just give you that accept webhooks and like, all the Versailles magic they do to make things run fast The edge is cool, but it's not totally required. Especially if you wanna do server side rendering, it's, like, more important for these boxes to be near your database scheduling functions with Kron, So, Well, so so that's where thing well, like, I don't know if you used the word set and map on purpose there, but, So what kids do is they'll, like, pull up their Scratch project, and side by side, they'll have a wolf project and just translate the code from 1 to the other, And it'll it'll just be working. It'll be a website, and it'll be a JavaScript, and and that's a great little transition. And then from there, I take them on to more web programming. So that that's the Yeah. The flow that I came up with. It kind of feels like even Valton is the next step there because Or webhooky jobs that, like, shuttle data between services. This is back to the if this, then that or Zapier use cases.

I gotta do it.

What what do you go to stay up on the latest and greatest in programming topics these days? These days, I turn to my left because my cofounder Tom McBride is, or drop a review if you like this show.

I really wanted my door to be able to unlock my phone, but I live in an apartment building.

but Replit actually kind of, in some sense, spun out of Codecademy he created the logo programming language, which is a predecessor to the Scratch programming language, and he kind of expand this So,

Scott doesn't

MCW.

sponsor transitions anymore, so he sneaks those types of things in when he can.

What what does Tom have a Twitter handle? Does he,

For high for even for middle school kids, Scratch might be a little bit harder to swallow. For high school kids, I don't know if it'll launch this week, but, how to Construct a function, how to name variables, that sort of thing.

Like, on top of a light switch, and it'll it's like a button presser. I think that was their 1st product. Oh. But they have this one that's designed specifically for opening a door, and you can attach it to the inside of your lock Just, like, right on the outside of it, and it, like, has a little handle, and it turns

better than I do. So I asked Tom, Tom, what's going on with React server components? And he he He he makes a noise.

the board activity from the board activity API. And that's just like a cute little thing to show me how to use it in an interactive way,

Like inspiration. So for instance, I told it that I wanted inspiration,

Have you have you spent a lot of time coming up with these little inspiration demos? Is that is that tough to do, or is it,

Every Vowel be one thing. Like, if you try to put 2 variables

like, like, early

And then you just have access to to So this type of stuff. So I think, like, using

But, yeah, like, dripping you with inspiration, After reading them and and being quite expired inspired and and getting into making dev tools,

query language almost, or, like, we want the feel of it to be Like, in Excel, you have a whole sheet of data Join us in the Discord. We're very friendly. We, we we get our hands dirty and help you debug

But it's also also practical.

Yeah.

code first as well. Like, did you did you ever go down any of these, like, low code, no code,

every day

there are a number of things about Vows that that aren't web standards And and And it works in like you said, you just you're constructing HTML via string, and it's rendering on the server. So it's it's pretty bare bones today,

you can schedule cron jobs.

WYSIWYG probably

misconception that that, like, syntax is what's holding people back.

because, like, early web, everyone, it was just sort of, like, building their own things. And, like, I could imagine, some of the touts their

to any of this. There's there's hardly even a safe, you know?

Like kids or friends using Vowel and then sharing, like, I don't know, sharing their latest status update. And you

could literally import all of your friends' status updates and put them in your top 5 or, like, their profile photo, you know. And It's really cool that you don't have to there's no NPM published

But in the future, Val10 will Vows will probably be modules, And then you can have multiple statements, and you can explicitly export and import things. But that's it it might be a bit of a long road before we get there. Say one thing I really like for for new users out there who Who might hear a tool like this and think, is this right for me to start exploring with? Or is this too high level? I think One thing to ease some of those concerns if you have those would be that, While Wes is still working on his, no, I fixed it. I just,

in a Vowel, it wraps it in a iffy. Right? the Vowel town would be a nice little press over, So we are welcome, Steve. Thanks so much for coming on. Yeah. Thanks. Really excited to be here. Let's Start by giving us a quick rundown of, who you are and what you do, and then we'll get into

leaning towards revisiting. So that one, And then, like, in terms of these, like, built in API things, I I had this period of almost 3 years where I and we're, like, the easiest, quickest tool to get started with and play with.

more like a spreadsheet than, an IDE.

But to be, like, kinda kick started. We need to inject a lot of that early inspiration ourselves.

but there are a number of choices including that one that we're, CNN tweets can be embedded in websites. Tweets can be retweeted and commented and liked, and, oh, I think you get analytics for them all, you know, A lot. I don't know. Like, every couple seconds.

Probably a Smart call there.

things instead of this? Definitely. Yeah. So And when somebody

Mhmm. And so a big inspiration for me is spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are kind of like this programming environment, this, like, IDE for programming,

just come natural to you from working at a teaching.

VBA, like like, the Excel syntax language. You just you figure it out.

in that sense, this one user I've never heard of had this 1 valve that's, like, pinging his his, like, home sensor for air quality every, He has a lot of, like, really iconic

simply making

What what are some of the other features that sort of just come along with the platform? Yeah.

Val town does a really good job of providing,

which contains a number of statements.

the the bar to this kind of stuff is is really low, and it's really neat that it's

platform reply to this question by asking more questions. Like, who are you? What, like, No. I I think it's one of the biggest challenges for an open ended platform is that it Like, a big part of our job is inspiring people. It it ValTown is a two sided marketplace in the sense that, because that's the kind of why Dino was built for, like, their permission model. So why why Dino for the evaluations and not for the, but then, a tiny history lesson.

And and you have to, like, do all these steps to get to build and running your machine. But in Vowel town, we think we can get the best of both worlds where it's a

A great platform.

And there's no there's no, like, export or import, is there? It's simply just variables are globally available?

And the function we we have you schedule Basically, 3 years of research, I'm I'm vaguely dyslexic.

That keeps getting better for more and more advanced use cases, and the the other half is inspiring people with what they can even do with it. Yeah. The the primitives like, let's talk About that, some of the I don't know if you call them primitives or not, but it comes baked in with you can email yourself, And puts them out on the page. So within

a function.

and it gave me a function that returns,

either at the time that I made the decision, there was no standard and now there is, or maybe I just didn't know by the standard at the time. But, that's one that we're looking at changing. We're look so right now, a val is a value, and so it's either, like, let x equals 5 or it's a IFFE, which, an immediately executed Function expression, There's a book that I can't remember that Title of that's really good about computer history, like Internet, computers early,

Early web,

But at the end of the day, and

and formulas that are just working. And at any given time, you're just editing one cell. And if there are errors in that 1 cell, it's all very isolated. Everything else continues to work. In a normal programming project, you know, 1 index error, the whole thing breaks, nothing runs,

So,

Yeah. We're using code mirror 6 for the editor, and and then we have a a bunch of custom autocomplete

very smart.

It's Remix React. How

What's the the idea behind

helpers. Oh, I have not seen CodeMirror before. I don't know how I haven't seen this. But No. I I'm pretty sure that's what

Really? Yeah.

Like, I I could tell that I was one of the first people Yeah.

based API does support Hano. So you can you can just use

like, I've been trying to move all my server stuff to web to deployed on the Internet is it can be just seconds. Yeah. Yeah. In that way, we, we were

And the one thing is that, like, there's

yeah. We're quite happy with it. Nice. And I I guess we can talk about the the back end then. What what so what it seems like everything's very snappy In this platform, so what's the the back end look like? So we have like, our API server is just a Node Express server,

where should we start with? With the front end or the the back end? Mhmm.

I and I'm I'm pleased to say that as far as the last time I checked, our,

like,

CodePen is running on.

Yeah. I I don't I don't know. Yeah. It's it's pretty popular. It's that it's it's Code Mirror or Monaco from from Versus Code. I've used Monaco, but have not used CodeMirror. You know? Yeah. Monaco is what I've I've used in the past. CodeMirror is pretty cool. And what about like, are you using any JavaScript framework for the entire UI?

web responses.

quite that high praise yet.

we wanna do it offline. Yeah.

the prototype is almost done of the response API. Oh, sweet. So so So maybe it'll launch next week. Yeah. The the one thing about the consult.email, They're,

High praise. I don't I don't know if we deserve to answer to go back to your question of, like, where did the inspiration for this come from? API. We it might even Like, this random language, and I couldn't figure it out. And it turns out he had a very specific or TMCW.

That is

corresponds, or you can use Hano on top of it. Oh, cool. Right from about 10. Oh, sick. Nice. Can we ask you about the tech stack Behind everything, I

web standards, but then it also adds A couple little handy helper functions on top, which are really nice. Yeah. Yeah. I I've I've heard you talk about it in the show, actually.

To host Remix on Netlify

response in in a lot of ways.

winter CG stuff, The request response, fetch APIs, all that. Yeah. Yeah. We're we're we're we're going there.

returning errors or whatever. They don't often have it. So I've been I I've talked about this many times on the show. I've been in love with it. I've been This, package called Hano JS,

like like web primitives,

we we definitely want that, in the in the front end editor.

And, because I found, like, 6 or 7, like, little bugs along the way. And, Obviously, I I logged them. We got them fixed. But,

but I know a lot of improvements to make, but we just, yeah, we just don't wanna,

I certainly would not want to to do that because then you're supporting it 3 years down the road when people moved on, but you still have to keep it going.

evaluation server is it's, so Val Town code runs on Deno. So it's like a Deno platform. We moved from node to Deno, I think, in January.

with Dino.

some there's not always, like, the niceties like JSON

But you can return h t you can return and render HTML in Val Town via the express endpoint.

I wanna talk about that or ask about the Express endpoint as well.

for for all these things. So We're we're thinking about it carefully, and we're we're not try we're trying to not be hasty.

but a lot of companies,

code execution,

we'd know that there are dragons in in UI and that It's just,

It's dangerous.

a a a tar pit. Like, if we re from a surface area perspective and a focus perspective,

or is there any UI,

you know, just doing basic,

So Yeah.

But Totally. As a business, as a company, we, like, we need to scale. And and for our users, okay, we need to scale to real use cases. Like, that's that's where, vows and modules and, like, web standards.

We can

plans. Because, like, what I often see is

it's just the place where everybody posts They're demo stuff, and, like, everybody's riding the free plan forever. Mhmm. And then when it comes to doing, like, real stuff,

work from, like, so many different perspectives that, yeah, if we get bogged down in And making UI work and supporting React and Svelte and just If, GitHub gifts Could run. And if AWS Lambda were fun, and we're trying to triangulate basically what we do somewhere

what about, like, what is the the UI story

Definitely not a a focus for this platform. That's a great question.

Who was it? I was trying to

String concatenation to return HTML from a request. Is is there any,

HTML. Like, the first thing is, like, we could just support JSX, I so after I left the after school program, limits.

Val town is being just a straight up,

Speaking of, like, professional

you know, like, Kuroku famously wasn't able to to keep people at scale. Yeah. Totally.

people,

really make a big mistake by, like, wading into it not thoughtfully.

quality of life things that you're thinking about for UIs, or is UIs

for these snippets? Do you do you primarily see

talking about it the other day where some there's some company where it's

Anyways, they're they're like there's a lot of decisions we make here, and there aren't a lot of great web standards, can be shown on

There's there's just so much work To do to make our function execution platform teaching kids to code, I would, or or just education IDE and runtime.

they move away, and you Certainly do not want that. I was gonna say that some companies like, Vercel are are like, do a a really good job of getting the hobbyist and then keeping them When there are Fortune 500 companies, it it's yeah. It's like we find that's, like, half half the battle. Half the battle is making a

all the different variations, and then the next and and remix. It just, Mhmm. But but these days, I think I'm looking like, that decision is, like, a smarter decision. People aren't complaining as much.

So so right now,

How do you measure what would you learn? Is it Literally scratch?

it's not like you're using resources. Right? You're just kind of sitting there waiting for it. But then when it comes back and you're looping and and running reduces and doing CPU intensive stuff, that's where you actually get charged for for using the thing. So did you write your whole the differences between the 2 maybe I'll let you explain it. I've tried to explain it a couple times on the podcast.

is certainly one of those spots where I think this could be useful.

uptake in different areas? I know I know it's still pretty new. You're still figuring a lot of stuff out. But, like, what is Val Town. Now that I just said it, it's really cool.

are using our service the most.

what we what we can commit to being free for a long time and what

Super. Can you talk Well, that and any other areas you're starting to see uptake in or you wish to see uptake in? Yeah. Yeah. Great question.

wall

IoT Cool.

I just Crunch numbers yesterday to see, like, who which users

And so your paid plans

you you could use our service.

Oh, that's great.

Nice.

included in wall time. CPU time is is the actual time you're doing computation on our

you're not actually

not actually gated. These are these are aspirational send them to other services,

like, an entire

anyways, there are more guidelines about CPUs.

And by far, in that, like, developer

Had thought for sure you were on Cloudflare Workers because of that. Because that's that's usually how Cloudflare Workers

Oh, that's great. Are you seeing

And you don't have to write every single feature

yet. You know?

time and CPU time. So, This

says,

model that calculates how long these things are Running? How do you even calculate CPU time? Great question. To be honest, a lot of these things

And then it popped up again. Somebody tagged me

And as somebody who writes lots of little scripts and lots of little demos and stuff like that, I was like, this is This is actually pretty sick.

In a tweet, and I was like, alright, I'll I'll check this out. And Let's start with the front end. Sure. The front end is is amazing. Like, You can simply just start writing code, and the autocomplete is is perfect. And, like, I've I don't feel like I want to move back to my editor because,

which, having the The, like, the world open part,

like this in a while.

I went through it, and I used it. I was like, which is it's built on

quite honestly,

from A lot of things, but, specifically, we're having him on to talk about this project he has called val. Town,

is really cool. Like, this is really neat. I have not seen anything Functions, you know, or or

And, we and there's, like, an online community around the future of coding.

Yeah. That that's a great question. So,

I got really into the this problem of building dev tools.

Metadata. And so you can like, I can have a different name for function than you have because it's just like a a skin kind of on top. And and a rename is It's like an instant o one operation because the ID stay the same.

Specifically, this question of being able to reference anyone else's vows in a global name space,

which is which is quite cool.

code, and the names are just superficial

of reading I started my own company, that was an after school program teaching kids to code inspired by the one I went to as a kid.

And they just want that to be good. And so it turns out, Express. It's a good question. We thought about it. Oh, yeah. I think a big part of it was Remix doesn't work on Dino, And so Oh, right. Okay. We're, like, we're we're, like, unknown anyways.

part of my backstory that I skipped over, is similar in that valves are Represented as things in a database, and names are, like, an o of 1 kind of operation, but, it And so one of our newer projects is if you go to the to the Val Tan tutorial,

are just metadata.

In trying to build better dev tools, I things on our platform. Yeah. So In terms of, like and I yeah. Sorry. I was gonna add that in terms of who our, like, target user is, like, our all of our best users own,

It's a very interesting idea. I've never seen this Unison before, a new approach to distributed programming.

that I that it's it's it's better for everyone if there's, like, better businesses to be built and and, like, the tools that kids wanna use are just Adult dev tools that are just better. Sorry. So I kinda switched gears from building tools for for kids to just building dev tools. And then heavily inspired by Twitter,

kind of foisted some of these cool futuristic ideas onto an existing language as opposed to building a new language on top of them.

which is, like, a Haskell inspired functional language,

the Unison programming language,

papers, making prototypes. I have my own podcast called the Future of Coding, He he he knows how to stay up on all these things and,

At the end of the day, I did almost 3 years What you you want your widget to look like, and you can host it on GitHub guests. But if you want it to be a little bit dynamic, Val Tan is your perfect cohost for You're cohost for that kind of a a service. But, anyways, to togg list other common use cases, my personal favorite is poll jobs I'm a big fan of getting very specific with people and And getting concrete about what it is that they want. Like, yeah, what they're being motivated by

the names of variables or or values, functions, anything, the names A world of these valves that are all kind of running and there's data flowing through the system. And then at any given time, you're editing 1 and that valve might have an error, and you're working through that. You're not breaking the whole system. When you get that working, boom, it's live and running everywhere all at once. So Yeah. We can't wait to Awesome.

you said, compose them, use them, and and things like that.

Did the inspiration come from from being able to access anybody's little snippets?

code and being able to, like

social network where you're having access to everyone's,

Coding platform in a way that, you know, GitHub has always been described as a social coding platform, but it to me, it never felt like truly like a social

Network of kind. But this feels like an actual code

Yeah. I mean, it it it's so neat about this, and and it's Not not a surprise that you've taken inspiration from Twitter in so many regards because the whole thing feels like a a very, like, social

So I'm I'm quite passionate about teaching kids to code, But not for of at symbol of Steve Craft.fu, and boom. It's an import. But under the hood, we'll, So Sure.

So, anyways, thanks for letting me go on a little rant. No. That's great. I had not heard about Seymour Papert, so I'm gonna certainly look into him. Carry on. He he was a big influence of Alan Kaye and Brent Victor who are also, folks that I I admire and pull a lot of, has the properties that we need, like, lets you import as Flexibly as we need to to to be able to import, it's still pretty new. I think he'll be excited to hear about us talking about him. But, yeah, but he's been great. He he, He made a Val Town CLI

You could get that for free in Val Town. Yeah. Totally. We yeah. We wanna yeah. What what was the name of the Alfred alt the Raycast alternative you said? Sunbeam.

Sunbeam.

Ethos at MIT of making these programming languages for kids that have been really, really influential, I you know, with a Chrome extension. And,

and

Nice. Really quickly talk about, Pricing is that if you have a long fetch request,

to, like, navigate Val Town,

Like, the kind of I the grandfather of teaching kids to code is this guy named Seymour Papert Seymour Papert. And he was a mathematician and educational

And, Great. Yeah. These are these are great questions.

But back to your question of, like, how do you teach or, like, how would I think about teaching kids to code? So I started with Scratch, which is the successor to logo. It's a Language out of MIT. It's fairly popular these days. It's block based. So it really is programming, but you can't make a syntax error because these blocks fit together like Legos,

those are the links that everybody is, like, crazily looking for. So I was like, I gotta make sure We got it for the listeners. I just I put it in the show notes.

Like, what do you have any what are method methodologies on on teaching kids to code? People ask us this all the time as, like, how do you teach it? And I have young kids, and they're starting to get interested in it. And I've dipped into a few things with, an older nephew of mine. What what's your thoughts on how to teach kids to code? Yeah. Great question. So I would be remiss if I didn't start by giving you, like, And I like, pricing is based on

to take that on. Cool. I, I just found the link to Sunbeam. I know people are gonna be asking. Whenever there's, like, somebody casually mentions something on the podcast,

But we we need to build a couple more APIs to enable the community to

get a vial by version number,

the thing that really got me radicalized into, like, loving programming languages and programming tools is that when I was a kid, I was bad at math.

Features, So like, Val Town is this weird mix of a code runtime, like a function of the service platform, and it's like an IDE development environment where, like Mhmm. We need them both to be fast. Like, if you if you're at 1 plus 1, we wanna give you that evaluation

Evaluate about well, you can already evaluate about. But, anyways, basically, we're

client. He's made a a Val Town, is a function that will email you, Yeah. We've got us, like yeah. We're really using the crap out of render. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

That's great. Because

I think it's I think it's are, in this vein.

The carrot are like it's like, come learn how to make video games or learn how to make web apps. And secretly, you're gonna get, like, really good at math, or, like, mathematical precise thinking, debugging techniques. Like, to me to me, it's like the softer skills that you learn in order to program that is even more important than than, the like, what you can do with computers after.

And, and he it was his philosophy that started the after school program that I went to when I was a kid. And, it's gonna look too childish, and you'll need to find something different.

inspiration from.

been asking for more APIs because he wants to build, like, a Versus code plug in for Val Town. So you can write your your Vows right in Versus code, hit save. Oh, yeah. Hit save, so then Val Town gives you the results.

researcher, I if you come in our Discord and ask politely, I will tell you what things we actually hold you to and which things we will hold you to one day.

before Vercel had Cron Jobs, There was literally, like, a 100 start ups that's the kind of cool thing about the stuff we talk about it is that it runs in Deno. It runs in Node. It runs in Cloudflare workers and Mhmm. And all that stuff. So are you just running Deno on, using we we even talked about running JavaScript on a microcontroller

Sun. I I think yeah. Like, ray like a ray. Like like, it's a pun on Raycast, Sunbeam.

Chrome extension to, like, give you extra, like, That's my favorite use. These, like, little pull job y things that run every 5 minutes or every hour, and then console that email you or Post in your Discord when when I find something. Yeah.

like, he's one of our better community members, and, Zapier for developers. So if you have one off little scripts or cron jobs or integrations is education should be way more personalized. So whenever so I get asked this question a lot, And I always

I my life has been a bit of more of a windy road than This this conversation makes it seem, but definitely with respect.

which is true, but it's pretty hard to learn for an 8 year old, And it's and it's really hard to learn at the same time as learning, I, like, So if it if you have, like, long running API requests, like, if you're if you're calling out to g two p four And it takes 30 seconds. That's

for, like, you know, the if condition, the else condition.

they haven't really fully explored scratch, but they decide that it's for children. It's like, I'm just I'm done with this thing. I want adult programming. I want I want Python or JavaScript.

and you really get that down and get kids making games. It's, like, So engaging. Like, within their 1st

And then,

in Woof. So But, yeah, I guess, to be honest, like, a lot of this cut the idea of just a global name space really comes from the Internet.

like, you know, early in this conversation, I said syntax isn't that hard to learn, another use case that we're getting pretty good at is

And the shapes of the blocks give children hints as to how they function. So, like, one of my favorite examples is that booleans are hexagons, automatically generated for any eval, and then there's an express Yeah. If you, like, want a full express handler,

it's so easy to get

So, it's really thoughtfully designed in scratch. And so that's that's where I recommend people start because, identification of just from a text box and a button, and then boom, you're live on the Internet, and you have all the Internet properties of an Internet web primitive. And and that's the kind of what we're going for in Vowel town. We want Vows to be Web primitives, the way that tweet is or that a GitHub repo is or GitHub gist is, we want them to be like, there's a URL. It has all these properties, and it's like a live object on the Internet that other people can interact with in in a lot of ways.

You don't have to learn any new concepts or any it turns your your thing, and it works works great. I I feel like I'm a computer wizard. I walk up to my door and press a button, and it unlocks my door. Things are wild. I love the SwitchBot stuff. I've never She bought 1 myself. But anytime I see it, I'm like, that's the

in JavaScript It it's it's just like a I think we think about a lot, how how we wanna deal with persistence in Val Town

a snippet up and running. You don't have to worry about anything other than

programming after scratch.

What I broke it up was is first start with scratch and really focus on the concepts of behind programming, There there are a number of choices. Like, I can tell you why I did that initially,

hour or 2, they're they made a whack a mole kind of game in scratch. It's awesome. And then after a year or 2 of scratch, the or they just get old old enough that they're like

So the tool I built, Yes. So Seymour Papert has 3 books. So if you're passionate about,

the, like, fundamentals of programming, like, computational thinking. And so the way I broke it up after a couple years of That looks kinda neat in itself. Yeah. Yeah. Unison is very cool. And one of their one One of maybe their, like, their core cool idea is that

it's it's it has a hexagon shaped hole, And then and then it, like, accepts other blocks,

new API.

And for every block in scratch, there's an existing there's an equivalent command in Woof, So there's a one to 1 mapping. So, Databases, just right right away. Just do Mhmm. At me dot, you know, She's, you know, a sucky teeth noise.

it's been a while since I revisited it, but the tool I built, to help with that transition coding is is still really Copilot. I don't know if you use Copilot on a daily basis, but, It's it's so neat. Thank you. Wow. You really you really got the whole thing, this morning. I love it.

teaching, you know, hundreds of kids for for thousands of hours,

is I built a JavaScript framework called Woof JS, which is a pun on scratch.

just the programming syntax in in what you wanna create. So, wow, it's a very clear progression to me. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely it's it's so funny. Like, I I

the idea is,

And so an and, a, like, a logical and or logical or, it it in itself One of the biggest things we're missing is, kind of

just any human, like, even even, like, the really stupid people in the world, like, People who run countries can get on their phones and nobody really complains about learning Excel or learning

And this is awesome. Like, you literally just I I was looking for the Edit button.

I wrote a little guest book. So what it does is it it pulls a list of entries

5 minutes,

the variable or the function that you have. And and then I realized

it's so cool that you can just, like, interact with the different vowels Remix does does run on Dino. I have Does it? I have a website running on it. It was it was a bit of a dog to get up and running.

immediately, it's gonna give you API endpoint URLs

and I can, like, use their vows. And

is the one that displays and and puts a form there.

hitting the URL.

serverless function, I'm gonna call it.

And there's no, like, build process. There's no uploading. There's no

The 0

from an array, loops over them,

you can share values between vowels.

And,

probably 2 seconds, you could do one is you can write A little

on the Internet

on the Twitter app and just type in a text box and and press the tweet button, then boom. It's live on the Internet, and then they have a URL.

quickly,

And there is no edit button. You just you just start editing the code that is inside of it. And I was trying to rename it, and there is no rename. It it just Figures out the name from

You can create a val, Postgres database,

like, the the, like, hello world To AWS Lambda, you they literally make you upload a zip file, which blows my mind.

So one of my vows is is a guestbook array. One of my vows is literally a variable that's a number for hits, and then the other val

between each other. And and then I noticed there's other people who have published public vows, In in many ways, this kind of reminds me of, Is I I checked this out a couple months ago or or not, like, a couple weeks ago. I was like, oh, this seems cool.

side to that. If you need to be able to ping

Ecosystem,

and Mastodon And and developer tools,

or or like another one Yeah. Is that there are there's like this widgety plug in thing if you wanna cuss like, build custom widgets on your iPhone. I think It's called a Widgeon. I don't know. I can

Arduinos. It it's it's just a thing we've noticed.

Yeah. Leave a link later. And, and you need to, like, host some JSON in order to, like, specify

called Sunbeam, and he is he thinks Val Town would be, like, a perfect cohost At a certain point, Val Town users will inspire other Val Town users, and then we're off to the races.

Like, the the the kind of person who owns an Arduino is the kind of person who would like To hack around with Val Tan. Oh, that's great. It's funny because we just had an episode getting stuck,

and and you can import npm packages. We'll talk about all the features of it in just a second. But

Mhmm.

Like, whatever has mentioned on Twitter or Hacker News or, like, now I have Blue Sky We, like, walk you through all the different primitives of Altan. And, the 4th step of the tutorial is we show you how to schedule

poll jobs running, like, whenever I mentioned or or Val Town has mentioned, I immediately get a notification. That's how, like, West like, this morning when you tweeted about Val Town, you didn't tag me or Val Town, but I got a notification about it because I have a Vowel running that is is is constantly querying Twitter for mentions.

one of our new enthusiastic users is building a raycast an open source open source raycast alternative, because I started at Brett Victor, and then I just explored the graph of ideas from Brett Victor's website and his references and the things that his references reference.

not specifically just Arduinos, but, like, microcontrollers

and, You know, sometimes you use these, like, web editors, and you're like, I'm just gonna write it and copy paste it in.

An API or send some data out of it, that would be great. Yeah. And I think so one thing we've been seeing is Val Time's really gate great for plug in e systems. So there's this,

on, We should Let's see. TMCW.

Head on over to syntax.fm

Well, Like, you just want do you you wanna, like, tell your friends that you know karate? Like like, I feel like they they think they feel that way about programming. Like, I just wanna tell my friends I can code. Like, what does that even mean? You just wanna, like, brag about having a skill? Like, we need to get more specific about What you actually want here, and then and then we can support that. So back to your question.

And don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player

your code and get it working. So, we'd love to see your end. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I very much enjoyed this and Excited to see what you have in store for the future of Val Town. Thanks, guys. Really appreciate you guys having me on, and this is a really fun conversation. Wicked. Thank you. Peace.

for a full archive of all of our shows.

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