Building a developer social network with Steve Krouse from Val Town

Steve Krouse 0:00
I'd like to think about how long it took GitHub to make money on me. Like, I would love you to create your Valentine account when you're 14 years old. And like for the first dollar we get from you to be when you're like, 27 When you start your company. That's the kind of company I think that 10 is, and I'm happy with that.

Jack Bridger 0:18
Hi, everyone, you're listening to scaling dev tools. I'm joined today by Steve Krause, who is the founder of Val town. And Val Town has a poem on the homepage, they said says, If GitHub tests could run and AWS lambda are fun, Steve, great to have you on the podcast. Yeah, really great to be here. Could you tell us a little bit about vowel sound?

Fields the phone? Yeah.

Steve Krouse 0:46
Well, I guess from from a medium is a metaphor perspective. The poem will tell you about me that I really love metaphors and analogies. Maybe list yesterday, I can try and do it from memory. So yeah, Val town is like get a guest. If they ran, you know, there's a Run button on vows. It's like AWS lambda, but much more fun. It's like Twitter meets and pm and then it's social. And, but like sharing code. So like one tagline I like to say is that valtonen makes it as easy to import someone's code, or your own code as it would be to tag someone on Twitter. You're just like at Steve crass dot foo and then whatever the value of foo is, it's not just in your code.

Some other good analogies, I like to think of it as a spreadsheet, kind of like for JavaScript, or like a Jupyter Notebook for JavaScript or code pen for the back end. So anyways, enough analogy is Val town in plain English, is a social website where you can write and run JavaScript or TypeScript, we run the code on our servers, we show you the results. We, your code is instantly deployed and hit via hittable via API endpoints. You can also schedule it with one click to run on intervals. There's logging tracing, console dot email is one of our favourite features. So you can email yourself as easily as you'd like to the console. And yeah, many more.

I think last time we spoke, I told you that the most fun I'd hard coding was in the last like, recent memory was when I wrote this like, really silly script to book badminton courts for myself, and my friends. And I felt like you know, it's, it can be so fun, but in the day to day bait, like job you get, you know, a lot of stuff you're fixing bugs, making making sure stuff doesn't break. And it seems like Val town is like, you know, making it so that you can just go and like, create cool stuff without having to go through the pain of like, if you wanted to send an email then you've got to go and set up your you know, it's I mean, it's a hassle right every time SendGrid or someone if something like that still gonna take you solid half an hour at best of boring work.

Totally. Yeah, we want to knock down like all of those friction points. As much as possible. Yeah, and like so I guess one one analogy I forgot that kind of points to the like the job to book courts, I feel is like Zapier. Zapier for developers is another kind of tagline that I've seen other people that you've interviewed on this podcast have have tried to claim I think it's, it's there's definitely something there. Were like programmers want to write code, but they want some of the niceties and guardrails of of something like Zapier, and there are a number of us competing for that for that market.

Yeah, I guess this is kind of like an interesting segue to like, I've seen you've had quite a lot of success with like, marketing, like in terms of like Hacker News stuff, projects that have gone pretty well. And I saw one that you did was the Hacker News offers where you could like, yeah, that it well, right. I feel I feel like yeah, so

you could fall like Hacker News follow is kind of how we pitched it. It's like a synthetic way via polling via the API to follow people on Hacker News, because you can't actually follow people on Hacker News. But you know, you can do the same for a hacker news topic, like everyone in our space. So I'm alluding to when the last interview you had in the podcast, they also have like a Zapier for developers kind of pitch. And one of their examples around their homepage is also like a hacker news mentioned spot and if you gotta mention, it'll post your your company slack. We have the same kind of example integration. So yeah, that's a that's a popular one. We recently made a list of like some of our favourite use cases, and categorise them on the website. That's one of the huge challenges of a really horizontal platform like Val town is is explaining to people what it is what it can be used for could because it can be used for anything. It's, it's like, if you're trying to explain what a spreadsheet is to someone for the first time, you're like, it's like anytime you need numbers in a grid, like what are you talking about? So, but ultimately, that's where the power if you can pull it off, you know?

So how, how have you like, have you tried to, like artificially, like, hone it down? And go after certain people? Or are you just like,

more in the early days? I was doing? Some? I don't know, we're doing like a lot of different activities. We don't have. Yeah, so like, one, we have this new website called, like, what can I make with Val town like valtonen.com site, or gmail.com/use cases, I think is the URL. And it lists like a dozen or a couple dozen use cases that we think are cool. I guess eventually, we'll need to do the thing that a lot of websites do, where they kind of asked you who you are. And then depending on your like user profile to show you different integrations that like might appeal to. Ultimately, we don't want you hearing about Val town, and for the first time, and they're venting on our website and be like, What is this like, ideally, you're hearing about valve down through someone else's valve. So I guess this is corridor strategy. That hasn't really panned out yet. But I would like to point out like this is my main focus is, I would like vows to be shared across the web, on the front page of Hacker News, and Reddit and all the places you would see a GitHub repo, I want a valid link, which is going to be really hard to pull off. And I think for those of us who like me, before I started this company, I didn't realise what a cool GitHub had pulled off by making get GitHub repos into a web primitive. Every programmer understands you land on a GitHub repo, you know what it is, you know that it's for cool. You notice scroll down to the readme, there's all this metadata stats, you know, you can star it, you look to the stars, see how many stars there are. It's like a GitHub repo is a web primitive. And the way that a tweet is a web primitive, the way that an RSS feed is a web primitive, and, and like thinking about all the ways that GitHub made it a web permanent, like remember the banner, like 10 years ago, like for like fork man on GitHub, or, you know, pull requests on GitHub, I think there's forking on GitHub banner, and then even GitHub Pages, GitHub never wanted to be in the business of static website hosting. Like, they, they never wanted to be in GitHub Pages websites, were only to show off your GitHub repo. Like that's what it was about. In the beginning, like people like abusing her pages and like made them like a poor man's for sale before like for sale, kind of like and Netlify kind of capitalised on that. So anyways, we're spending a lot of time investing into making vows. Also, rich Web primitives that are worthy of being shared just bear links to a vow. Like we just had to read these two vows, you know, GitHub repos have read needs you can like about what we're getting there, but it's still not taking off. But anyways, to your point about like, how do we show people what vows are useful for? Ideally, you're showing off a snippet of JavaScript or types or TypeScript or like a formidable script. And that's how you learn about our town, you're like, you learn about it implicitly, when you're learning about someone's specific Val.

Yeah. And then I guess, it's like, when someone goes to create a piece of code, they're like, you're in their mind is like the easiest way, because we're all kind of lazy. I felt like we just want to be the things that is going to be easy. Because we, we've got this cool idea, we just want to make it happen fast. A lot of the time, I felt like,

yeah, to me, the keyword is default, like Val tone needs to be the default place, you go to code, in the same way that Twitter is a default place you go when you have like, this is a thought that like my audience would like, you just pull up and Twitter, wherever you are, like valtonen, us pull it open, you're on the train, well, I guess as long as the train is above ground, you probably found 10. And you're just coding away on your phone. And, you know, you can build the whole thing. And like also the default place you go to find examples of things that have already been done. So like, you're like, oh, I want to play with a tonne of API, you just go to Val town search for Teyonah you find like 17 examples, you know, I got that's close to what I want, copy and paste. And you're off to the races. But part of the magic of our time is that vows all like share a runtime. And so there's no like installing the language, getting the version, right, making sure the packages work. Like you really only have to think about the code because if it worked for someone else, it's gonna work for you.

Yeah, sounds difficult to do. On your side, I guess.

Our solution is just very restricted. Like it's only Like the one version, everyone gets the same version of TypeScript. And, and so there's no conflicts. Like, if you're complex, everyone has suffers from them. Like if we upgrade TypeScript, and it like breaks some code from before, then it breaks for everybody, which, maybe one day we'll have a more nuanced approach to it. And like, there'll be different versions of the Val 10 runtime that you can like explicitly pin. We'd like to avoid that as long as possible. But yeah, it might become inevitable one day,

because you see it as like a social network. Almost. You said, right, like, yeah, yeah. And so that is so important to have like, that you can play around with

one of the core principles of our tennis composability. So like, this is the reason why vows are small snippets, like tweets are small snippets. Because, like, the reason takes that back, like, why, why are tweets limited in character lines, like why when you make a tweet thread, you make like a series of tweets, I think the reason is, so that each individual piece is likeable individually, reply to a bowl individually, ad infinitum. And then re tweetable, individually, ad infinitum, in every direction. And so like, you know, you could imagine this at the word level, or that character level, you know, but, but ultimately at the tweet level, is kind of the right semantic abstraction. It's like kind of like a sentence, kind of like a paragraph. And you can break it up however you want, whatever you think is like the atomic unit of your thought, I think that's perfect for Twitter. And same for Val 10. And, you know, we valtonen style is like small snippet, small functions, that you compose into larger functions. And so then you can reuse all of your little functions. And so can everyone else in the world if you make them public. And so we all benefit from composability. And in theory, like less code needs to be rewritten, but you can just import someone else's thing. And they don't have to go through the, like the extra lift of like publishing 10pm. And like dealing with all that nonsense, they wrote it, they're using it, they hit a button, it's public, now other people are using it. And so the composability, so like that composability is really enabled by everyone sharing a runtime that really helps that story, if like, everyone's code was pinned to different runtime, and we had to, like, run your code, and then be like, Oh, now you want to run some code in different runtime that spin up at runtime? You know, everything comes slower and more of a headache. So that's, that's part of why it's important that everyone share the same runtime for composability.

Yeah, that's an exciting feature. And actually, like, I just kind of jumping back almost to when you said about, like, GitHub and just kind of become this kind of, like, mass adoption. I don't know if we said this on our actually, I think I feel like we've we've discussed it anyway. But to get Val town to be so vague, I feel like it's it's like really hard, right? Like, there's not many get hubs. That's not many.

Yeah, like you were saying, it's just gonna happen replicate, like what other developer tool, maybe code sandbox now has, like millions of users, like what the developer tool has millions of users, maybe Hacker News.

Jack Bridger 13:20
Yeah, there's not many. And so I kind of wondered, like, how you're thinking about this, because I guess you've got to not just like, do well, you've got to do like, astonishingly well, like it's so I wonder like how your approach is going to be? And how you see that happening?

Steve Krouse 13:38
Yeah. So I guess it's a balance of like the do things that don't scale. But like always keeping an eye on scalability. So like, that's one thing that my investor like is always advising. He's like watching me really go above and beyond with customer service for like, even non paying users and the discord constantly or on Twitter or wherever. And then he's like, okay, great, but like, how do we get move this from discord into the product? How do we move this from you doing it on the product to like other valtonen users doing it to other Valentine users on the product? Like, we want it so like, people will come on Discord, and they'll share a cool vowel? Grey, but like, how do we get how do we get people sharing vows on Valentine? How do we make cool vows rise to the top on Val 10? That's like one question then. Now I want to like comment on that Val, so I can comment on Discord. Or another common pattern is I want to get feedback. And so it's like too annoying to like, give feedback and writing. So I'll fork their bow, make the changes I want and then send him a link to my fork file, which is great. But that belongs in a comment on the platform. And then it like it the platform maybe there's like a way to denote or maybe there's like a structured way to say like this is a pull request. It's like a fork and a pull request. And then like they can hit a button to accept the changes and then I can be credited somewhere for like my contribution. You know, So in some ways, I am trying to, like rebuild much of GitHub, into Val towns like, you know, you want to like needle start with comments like you want to submit an issue, submit a pull request, submit a comment, I think maybe in the beginning of all the comments, but But one day, you could imagine like about having separate issues, separate pull requests, separate branches. Anyways, that's kind of further down the line. But um, okay, so back to your question about like, how am I thinking about achieving, like, huge scale. So ultimately, what I think needs to happen is vows need to go viral, do I get every posts go viral. And, and, and then they need to infect other people with a love of our town, like they need to ambiently. And so this is like viral, like word of mouth, but like viral virality. And like the truest sense, like, people hear about valtonen, because other people are using Val 10. And then you sign up for about 10, you get into it, you make cool vows, those end up on the front page of Hacker News, which infect other people. And then the graph really does look like 5% Every week, because the more people who sign up, the more people who sign up, because, you know, people keep making vows, which get other people to make cool valves, that that's the only way we could succeed. And we're not, we're not there yet at all. Like we have a smaller number of people who are quite excited about it and use it a lot. And tell people about it. But it's not. It's not like the mythical product market fit that I've seen in movies and heard about. But we're working. We're working on it.

Jack Bridger 16:38
Yeah, that's, that's so cool. So do you spend more time at the moment on getting people to try it? Or do you spend more time on like, making people want to like, share and all that? How do you get? Think about getting valves to go viral?

Steve Krouse 16:58
Yeah, they're like so many different directions. So one is like, people who love our town, like, how do we get them to tell their friends about it? And write blog posts about it and just like be evangelists? Like, how do we get them to make cool valves that have a chance of going viral? Get them to share those vows? Like how do we get like the Pro users to really love it. And so that that involves things that aren't really growth activities, like people want vim key bindings, and so we added vim key bindings, which like is not a growth activity. But like people are tweeting about how like, there are vim key bindings are like, so exciting. And like that's, that's a growth thing, you know? So like, I guess, you know, whatever. I'm not inventing product lead growth, but like building a product that people love and love to talk about is like at the heart of the strategy. But then, of course, like when you share a vow, it needs to be shareworthy. Like, how does the share image look? How like when you land on a vowel, does it? Is it explainable, where you are, what it is? Or like, all those little are the is the SEO for the page good. Like, there are all these little details you have to get right? A huge one is embedded vowels like we've been kind of limping along, you can embed a vowel, it doesn't look great, doesn't load fast. But I think one way that we totally win is if people showing off node libraries, or API companies wanting to show off how to use their API, if they're embedding us in their documentation, or people writing blog posts explaining JavaScript concepts, or like beginner classes, or using Val town to teach beginner JavaScript. That's also a huge way we could win. But that's just like a different lens on, like, valtonen, that we haven't really put enough Polish into that we need to another area of growth. So a new thing we've been doing is every Thursday, the team is not allowed to work on about 10 the product, we all have to try and make vows to go viral. Which is like a really fun, creative day. It's in some ways, it's like the hardest day of the week. And in some days, it's the most fun day of the week. But it's also hard because it's like, like, I don't know, I don't know if you ever put on like the viral cap of like, how do I make us go viral? Or like, what's something that's intrinsically interesting to me and will be interesting to other programmers and could be built in valtonen. And like a day, it's harder than like just adding a button that a user wants to up to our product. Sometimes it's easier to like Polish a product it is to use the product in a creative way. So yeah,

Jack Bridger 19:38
have you got better at that? Is there any like things that you've picked up like, Okay,

Steve Krouse 19:43
we haven't had a vowel go viral, really in a while. So we're not doing well, in terms of making videos go viral. The last one that went viral is that like Hacker News follow one, which we branded not as As a vowel, we branded it as like an installable script. And so we keep experimenting and exploring this tension between a vowel, which is like a script, which is usable. Which isn't really like picking up like people aren't like that excited about vows at the moment for some reason, but when we branded it as like, a script with like an instal button, so we just all we did was change the instal button to sorry, change the fork button and to instal button, the behaviour is the same. We just like change the button, the call to action to instal, it did really well. So, we probably need to experiment more with x. So that's like, definitely one angle that we haven't explored that well, that like we haven't explored that enough. Like, I would like vows to go viral on their own. But, but if people want apps, I guess we can give give the people apps.

Jack Bridger 21:00
That's interesting. Yeah. One of the things I wanted to ask you about as well is like, that's some stuff you do that is like, you know, I speak to a lot of Dev Tools play around with a lot of turtles. And like, largely, a lot of things are familiar, there's like new things applied in different ways and solving different problems. But like, when I tried our Val town the first time, and you may have changed this. But when I created my account, it was like, a completely new experience where it was like, I was just coding. And signing up at the same it was like, my login, the login process, or the account creation process was like, in the code, or I was like,

Steve Krouse 21:45
Yeah, we did change this actually. We brought back elements of that, in like, in onboarding, but But yeah, so when we when you first started with Flowtown. Like everything you'd want to do, like any setting you'd want to set would be like a JavaScript command in, in the code editor. So like, setting your handle was like a command, like set handle, and you give it a string, and it would say, your handle or throw an error, and you can change your handle. You know,

Jack Bridger 22:14
it was really cool, though. I, it was so memorable. And I think I like I'm sure I tweeted about it. If I didn't I almost I thought about tweeting about it. I'm like, Why did you get rid of it? Not saying you should bring it back? I'm curious about

Steve Krouse 22:29
Yeah, mate, you're you're making me think you're bringing your back in? Well, if we, if we brought it back, we'd bring it back in, like, probably a faked way. Like it wouldn't. That basically the issue was there were too many degrees of freedom. And users just had error signing up. And, and like, that's just not what the bottleneck we want to be happening. Like, we want this. Yeah, ultimately, like, there were too many degrees of freedom, like a signup flow is a really specific kind of thing. And like having to teach people JavaScript as they're signing up to your product is like not that not the place to do it. Like you want to like get them into your product. And they're signed up, they have an account, you have their email address. And now let's teach you the product while having you continue to set up your account. So like one of the ones that I'm excited about is so we here let me go to the tutorial and pull up the exact thing. So step one in that tutorial is to create an API that's not very meta, step. Three in the tutorial is cancelled out email, we teach you how to send yourself an email. And the email we have you send is your own welcome email to Val town. It's like Hi, welcome to Bad town, like here's some tips. And you can like click in and see like the HTML for that email is just another vowel. And then we do it, we do it again, we do the trick again on the next step, the fourth step in this tutorial, we show you how to schedule a function. And so we have you scheduled your own drip marketing campaign. So we, we have you like, yeah, console that email send yourself like inspiration emails about like things you can do in Val 10. And we have you have you scheduled to send yourself an email every day. And it's all customizable. You can have it send yourself an email every hour every year, never again. You know, just just a little meta joke about what we'd like to do and we're going even further in this direction, but in less like cute cutesy ways like that one, like most people, I think will like Unschedule right away because they're, you know, like, I don't want this is nonsense. But what we're really excited about that we're launching in a couple of weeks is like anytime someone likes your vowel anytime someone references your vowel anytime your vowel throws an error and you Time, your val is like hit via API for the first time, anytime your Val has like a spike in traffic, like there are all these times you do want to get notified. And so, but like everyone wants notification slightly differently. And so we could build like a really robust notification system that tries to get most of these things. Or we could build none of it, none of those things into the product and instead expose API's to get at that data. And then let you build pole jobs to like run queries on our API to like detect your vow through an error, your vow had new traffic, your vow was like your bow was referenced, and then send you emails based on those things. And so the idea is to, like have a marketplace of notification vows that the marketplace is free, but like a mark, like a marketplace of ideas, of vows that like people, you know, sure I want to get notified when my valid errors, but like, I want an exponential back off to that, like I don't want to be notified every second if it's airing every second. I want I want like to be notified the first time and then maybe every hour and then every day and every week, and you know, those fade off into the sunset. And so the Valentine is perfect for this kind of like programmatic customization of notification emails. And so that like installing those into your account, will be part of the tutorial like hey, like, we think you want these like these six notification things like by default, like just press here to instal them all. You can customise them later. Arbitrarily it's code

Jack Bridger 26:26
circle. So that's like an actual useful, like, what people would consider, like really useful. And they can see how that works. That's very cool. Yeah, in general, like, how do you think about like, you're passionate about education? And it feels like that's kind of a big challenge, because there's lots of new stuff with Val and I don't know, like, if you because you're reaching so many people, a lot of people will, I guess be like, new to development, maybe, as well. And how do you think about that? Yeah.

Steve Krouse 27:06
My, like, medium term ambition is that someone will decide to build a learn to code, interactive course, on top of our town, like, the long term ambition is that there are hundreds or 1000s of learn to code courses on Val town, where, like, maybe the course has embedded vowels that the students can edit or interact with, or it links out to that town or just recommend about 10 is the place to write their JavaScript, I think that'd be awesome. I guess in a real long term, I could imagine like, somehow embedded in our product, like a whole course, embedded in our product that we made that we kind of BLESS as like, here's a good way to learn JavaScript. But But ultimately, I think it'd be better. If we, if we give people the building blocks to build educational tools without town and, and we let other people write the actual content, we're just the evaluation engine. I had someone reach out and ask, like, like, hey, like, I'd like to build a course valtonen and use it as the evaluation engine. And we can like split the profits. And I was like, What are you talking about, like, you take all the profits from your course, like, you're just you're just advertising my platform, like, this is what I what I want, like, you know, I don't need to, like you're giving me like, you're turning all of your students into Valentine users, which will like, like, maybe a long time from now, like, some of them will convert it like, into, into customers. I like to think about how long it took GitHub, to make money on me. Like I became a GitHub user at 18 as a freshman in college. And I think the first, you know, I went to work at companies that were also using GitHub. I didn't bring GitHub there, but I guess the company paid for my GitHub account. So I guess that's one way could have made money off of me. But really, like, I don't know, if you could count that, like, the first time I gave GitHub money was GitHub sponsors, actually, which is hilarious. And now I have a company and so I started paying for GitHub, and then GitHub actions increases, and now I'm paying GitHub, still very small dollars, but like I'm paying, you have plenty of money, plenty and you know, if the company scales, keep paying to get up, and that will be the same kind of company. Like, I would love you to create your Valentine account when you're 14 years old. And like for the first dollar we get from you to be when you're like 27 When you start your company, like, holy crap, that is a 13 year payback period. I think, like that's the kind of company I think that 10 is and I'm happy with that.

Jack Bridger 29:36
Yeah, that's, that's awesome. We don't we've not released it yet. But I did an interview with Brian Dougie, who was really early at GitHub, and I think he and also Natla phi and I think they had a lot of success with like, working with boot camps and like to they literally just go in there And helping doing workshops and showing that you can run code with Netlify I think was an I think they did a similar with GitHub as well.

Steve Krouse 30:10
Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I wonder if I should do workshops. I thought about it like go to hackathons go to boot camps do workshops. Yeah, I should. Maybe I should tweet about it and see if I could get some invites. That's my style. Yeah.

Jack Bridger 30:25
Oh, yeah. This this how you got this? Well, we already knew each other. But I don't know why if we had not done the podcast, but one thing I wanted to ask as well as like, you all got like you found it future of coding. Right? It was podcast is a podcast, big community. I just found out this one in London. I actually didn't know that. I do live in London. Yeah, I live in London. I know you used to live in London, right?

Steve Krouse 30:51
Yeah. No, it's Yeah, I haven't I had nothing to do with or like virtually nothing to do with the London future of coding meetup. Maggie Appleton runs it and I hear like the best things like have it every month. And it's like, so well attended. They always have a waiting list. Yeah, I, I would love to visit London and go one day.

Jack Bridger 31:12
Yeah. But it's kind of wild that you found this thing that lives on beyond you, which is really amazing. I wonder if that whole experience if it gave you any? Like, I don't know, things that you learned the kind of use without on?

Steve Krouse 31:31
Yeah, well, it is wild that it that it lives on without me. I sometimes I go to future of coding meetups, and people wonder who I am. And I think that's lovely. One of the things that I love, so I'm, it's funny for me to manage a community I find often the people who start and Manage Communities are like weird people. And, like, in various ways, and like one of the things is weird on me is I'm not that social of a person. And I'm not the sort of person who would hang out in a community. But I've like started a lot of things. I've started a lot of communities that I run. So I'm like, I find myself in the in the role of like, I'm a person who runs a community, but not really someone who's part of communities. So I don't have the best intuitions for like, what how to run communities or like, but I whatever, I figured it out both times. Like, I guess the thing you learned pretty quickly, like that you can't please everyone. It's like, it's a hard lesson. But like, I remember, like, basically every day or every week in the future of coding people would bring up like, can we move from slack to discord? Can we move from slack to whatever some other tool? Or can we like have a different style of communication? And like, we'd run polls, and it would just be like, totally split? Like, we literally can't please everyone like we just like someone has to make a decision. And I guess it's me. And then like, everyone else has to be like upset for forever. Like, like, that was a hard thing for me to come to terms with but I'm more at peace with that now. Like a big a big community thing that is contentious is like, Are you a chat style? Are you a thread style culture? And so like one thing we have, I'm a big threads person like I like if I could I would like infinite Lee nestable threads, like kind of like Hacker News or Reddit, I would I would I my dream and one day someone will come up with it is something that feels like a chat interface, like real time and no, like, really all you need is notifications. And I guess real time notice and like typing indicators. I want my real time Miss typing indicators, notifications, like discord and slack, but infinitely nestable replies like Hacker News and read it. I guess that's I'm kind of describing Twitter. And there is an alternate universe where Twitter or something like Twitter would be excellent for communities. Like if they tried it with spaces, it's just like didn't quite work. So anyways, I think there's there is an opportunity there. I know that that's what I want. And I've tried to make it in discord like we have this auto threader bot like whenever you make a thread in our general channel, it like auto turns it into whenever you make a message, it turns it into a thread. And then like people can reply in the thread. So I encourage people to not just like reply at the top line and like message everybody. We try and keep things organised in conversations, which I think he's great. Yeah, I'd like the infinite reply, but whatever. I think it's fine to just have the one level nested. Anyway, so now I'm getting to the minutiae of managing a discord.

Jack Bridger 34:41
Is it is it available in Beltone? The auto threading

Steve Krouse 34:45
that's a project we want to build. I forgot why I think maybe because we don't want support like loading the WebSocket connections there. There might be an issue with what like if you want it to happen immediately. I don't know if a combination of discord doesn't support the right things and valtonen support the right things for that to happen. Unless you have the vowel running like every second, which we don't really support. We will soon vows running every second right now, some, like some vows, I left some of my vows like to run every second. But that's not like what we want. Right now the minimum is once every minute, even if you're on the Pro Plan in one day, it'll be will allow you to run vows even more than once a second, once a millisecond if you want whatever, scalability we'll get there. But one one Valentine bot that we have that's really fun is as soon as you join the discord, you'll get a DM from the About Town slack. Valentine discord bot. And it's like Welcome to about 10 Discord. Here's a couple of tips. I was made on mountain view my source code here, you can click and it'll take you to its own source code. So that's that's why we try as you get the sense of terror like use Val town to welcome you to Val tan to show you how to use Val 10 as much as possible.

Jack Bridger 36:03
Yeah. Interesting. Okay. One very rogue question that may or may not make it into the final edit. Did you have you started this date me? thing on Twitter? Could you or Yeah, yeah, it seems to be like very popular.

Steve Krouse 36:27
Yeah, yeah. Happy talking to happy to talk about Damian docs. I would say I did not start date me docs. But I think I'm the world's leading advocate for date me docs whenever people write about them that recently the New York Times interviewed me about them. I'm like right at the top of the list of people to interview because I have the database of all the the docs. I saw people sharing these date me docs, I made one. I've gone on some dates from date me docs, I've like message women, they message me It's so damy Doc is a web a public website. That's an earnest long form dating profile. So it's like a Google Doc that you just made public or notion doc in my case that I've made public. And it just describes who I am and what I'm looking for in relationship. And I saw people sharing these across the internet. And I figured that they should be centralised somewhere. So I made a notion database and put them all in and slapped a form on it. And now the URL is date me dot directory. I've made a bunch of hours actually about damy ducks. So like I made a vow to turn the date me Doc database into an RSS feed so you can subscribe to updates. You can also fork my val i have another valid you can fork that will just send you a console that email notification whenever there's a new date me Doc entry. And then but like you don't want to date me Doc notification whenever there's any new date, like I want to get notification for every new date, because I think they're fun to read. But like if you want to filter by age, location, anything just like I like I give you a couple of demos of how to do that in code because about 10 You know programming platform so the AMI doc Yeah, so that's basically the AMI docs the recent maybe why you saw it in your feed recently is that the new drama is that there's new New York Times article is happening it seems we still don't have a publication date. But there's a schism in the Damita community where some people like me want as many eyeballs on their date me Doc as possible. Because like they're looking for a unique snowflake and they want like as many eyeballs like they want as many like at bats as possible like they want everyone to see their dog so that they can like recommend it to people who might be good for them. On the other hand there are some people who are it's like a little bit too sensitive like they don't want to like quite that much attention on their date me Doc and so I've had about a dozen people email me in the last day asking me to remove their doc from the directory because they don't want like New York Times level scrutiny on their Doc's which totally understandable. I I would like to believe like like you know, if I'm going to be a get on my high horse and talk about like the future of dating I would like to believe that it's a great thing a great exercise to go through to like write a date me Doc and like really get clear in words about who you are and what you're looking for. In the same way I feel like it's like a resume like think about Imagine if resumes didn't exist and like I started and I made like a long doc about like who I am what work experience I've had what kind of work experience I would like and I started sharing around this like work doc this like work with me Doc like I could see it like taking off his little movement like most people wouldn't do it. Some people would some people will be like sensitive and shy about it. But like ultimately resumes one like like it's a good protocol to have these documents that are like portable and shareable. explain you. And I think the same should be true about dating shouldn't be like, own and centralised and like walled private garden, like dating apps, it should be like an open protocol that we all maintain and, and share and whatnot. So that's my, that's my side project.

Jack Bridger 40:03
Yeah. And obviously, like all of the tech that needs the needs to power this, like, Baby ducks should be blown out.

Steve Krouse 40:14
Yeah, I guess in theory, I could move more and more of it over to Val town. Like right now. It's like a notion. It's like a notion website. But in theory, in theory, it should be about 10 website, even like the domain like, we don't even have custom domains on Belltown. Like, you know, we'll give you a subdomain. Like, it could be like Steve crafts dash directory, dot Val dot run, but like true, like, domain forwarding kind of thing. Nobody's asked for that yet. I'm excited for someone to ask for that. Because I think it'd be you know, we definitely need that feature. soonish. So I'm excited to build that one day.

Jack Bridger 40:54
Amazing. Okay, Steve, I think that's all we've got time for. Yeah, thanks so much for joining. And yeah, if anyone's listening interested, vowel dot town, go check it out. And Steve Krause on Twitter, right? Yes, sir. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for joining Steve. Thanks. So Chad. Thanks, everyone for listening.

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