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Talk of the Town is a monthly series where we highlight neat vals in userspace and conversation among the Val Town community.

Justin Uberti, creator of WebRTC and head of Realtime AI at OpenAI, built a hello-realtime val to demo OpenAI's new gpt-realtime-1.5 model. You can literally call the val! (As in "call the API" but also "call your mother.")

Paul Kinlan, Chrome DevRel Lead at Google, created a personal assistant email-agent val using Val Town email and SQLite, Deno sandboxes, and the Claude Agent SDK. It's live at memory-do.val.run.

Paul also wrote a colourful-scrollbar val using the new(ish) CSS @property rule (Baseline as of 2024) and scroll-driven animations, which you can play with at colourful-scrollbar.val.run, and an esper val that uses WebSpeechRecognition and Gemini models to enhance images, as an homage to Blade Runner's Esper machine.

For our party at the Val Town office a couple weeks ago, we dusted off our "doorman" buzz val to let partygoers buzz themselves upstairs.

Charlie 'n' friends also vibe coded a silly party-val photo booth, so you can relive the party at hivecoding.val.run.

Josh Beckman at Shopify wrote a comed-hourly-pricing-calendar val that produces an iCal calendar feed of ComEd electricity price changes. Josh also made a criticCron val that emails critiques for new posts on his personal blog.

Drew McDonald at Watershed made a dc-water-filter val that emails you if there's a DC water emergency in your configured home radius

Peter Liu wrote an importLatest utility val that grabs the latest version of an imported dependency val, bypassing the cache. This is a nice DX improvement when you're actively updating both a val and its dependencies. Thanks to Peter for opening a pull request to add this to the upstream std/utils library!

Peter also made PineconeIndex, an interface for Pinecone vector databases using OpenAI embeddings to vectorize and search

Raymond Cameron wrote about Using Val Town to Get Me to the Movies

Curt Cox built a cors-audit val that checks the CORS policy of various APIs, live on cors-audit.val.run.

Paul Chin Jr. built guess-that-hype, a "millennial-core quiz about recycled tech hype" (I scored a 3/8, very Gen Z of me). Paul also made devfest26-raffle, a colorful raffle website for the NorfolkJS meetup.

Trevor Munoz created a lakeland-timesheet Slack bot val to track intern work hours on the Lakeland Digital Archive project

kamalnrf built a golinks val for personal /go links, live at golink.val.run, and a sprite-playground val inspired by Josh Comeau's blog post on sprite animations

Charlie made a self-improving-podcast val that generates a custom daily podcast in his Apple Podcasts feed, and meet, a minimal personal booking website (live at charliechat.val.run)

Sean Peters made marx, a personal bookmark manager val with tag filtering using Val Town SQLite

Cam Pak wrote a semantics-css-demo val live at semanticsui.val.run for the nascent semantics-ui npm package

Tomaso Valmax made brain, a binaural beats val live at brain.val.run (wear headphones for intended effect)

Cole Lawrence built an ephemeral-links val live at to6r.val.run for "short links that self-destruct in 48 hours"

Jenn Schiffer wrote a pixelstats utility val to analyze tiny pixel art images

ceculbe made an html-css-js-template and several other vals like it for learning core web development concepts

Christopher de Beer created mental-models, a collection of interactive mental models

CapMan made an ikon-snow-alert val to monitor fresh powder and a rocketLaunchMonitor val to track rocket launches.

I (Pete) made a copy-sqlite-table val to copy your account-scoped sqlite databases to a specific val (because now every val gets its own database). Then Nico remixed it to make an even better migrate-sqlite val that fully migrates tables, views, indexes, and triggers from account- to val-scoped databases

Steve is working on vtrr, a Val Town React Router framework with SSR and client-side hydration and navigation. The aim is to find a middle ground between 100% SSR (e.g. using Hono) and 100% client-side (e.g. with React).

Steve also made a x402-playground val and wrote a companion blog post about how the x402 protocol could make API keys obsolete. If it pans out, it could be like Apple Pay for APIs, moving you through the subway turnstile without ever stopping at the ticket machine.

And one more: Steve vibe-coded a steve-eval val to judge and rewrite LLM-drafted essays to match his writing voice. He wrote a blog post about it: getting AI to write like me

Some developers in the atproto space (colloquially, "the Atmosphere" best known for Bluesky so far) have taken an interest in Val Town. Tom wrote about the AT Protocol, made an atproto-login val, and will be at ATmosphereConf in Vancouver this weekend.

If you'd like to be featured in next month's Talk, share your vals in our #showcase channel on Discord!