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I agree, we have a lot of difficult questions to answer. (Founder of Val Town here) Now we work well with small amounts of code, great for integrations, prototypes, internal tools, hackathon projects, home-cooked apps. You could think of us like "zapier for developers" or "retool but in code". Both of those companies built huge businesses without figuring out a lot of those issues. But we're hopeful we'll figure them out. eddd-ddde is totally right that we're building a higher-level abstraction, like Heroku did, so we do avoid some complexity that way, and have better scale-to-zero economics, ie no need to lug around a whole file system for each runnable code. The hard questions I'm currently focused on are working with groups of "vals" (ie folders or projects or some other abstraction), so you can fork, branch, and version them as a group. Part of me just wants to go back to files and folders and leverage git & github, but there's also something really powerful about live, rich, web objects, like tweets or a hacker news thread, that don't map well to files and folders. I really love this public discussion with some of my advisors and main investor about the tradeoffs of files & folders: https://github.com/val-town/val-town-product/discussions/106 We have a great investor (Dan Levine) who knows that these sorts of products take time. We have a small team (currently 4) which means on our current fundraise (5.5m) we have 3-5 years to figure some of these things out. If any of these problems sound interesting and worth tackling to you, we're hiring :) |