Supper Club × val.town with Steve Krouse

In this supper club episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott talk with Steve Krouse about val.town, what it is, his philosophies on teaching people to code, the tech stack for val.town, and the benefits of inspiring kids to learn to code.

• 00:36 Welcome
• 01:27 Who is Steve Krouse?
• Steve Krouse
• Future of Coding
• stevekrouse (Steve Krouse) · GitHub
• Steve Krouse (@stevekrouse) on Twitter
• Coding Classes for Kids & Teens | Coding for Kids | The Coding Space
• 03:06 What is Val.town?
• Val Town
• 08:35 Where did the inspiration for social dev environments come from?
• 12:52 WYSIWYG code vs being code first
• 16:30 How does val.town inspire people?
• 20:26 How do you prevent people abusing val.town?
• 24:57 What’s the UI story for snippets on val.town?
• 27:31 Do you plan to support express?
• 29:03 What’s the tech stack behind the front end of val.town?
• 30:35 What’s the tech stack for the back end of val.town?
• 34:37 How do you measure for pricing?
• 37:07 Who is using val.town?
• 42:00 What’s your methodology for teaching kids to code?
• 47:44 Supper Club questions
• GitHub - pomdtr/sunbeam: Generate powerful TUIs from simple scripts written in any language.
• Deno — A modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript
• A Small Matter of Programming
• The Unison language
• CodeMirror
• A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing
• Stripe Press — Ideas for progress
• pomdtr/sunbeam: Generate powerful TUIs from simple scripts written in any language.
• Seymour Papert
• woofjs.com
• Bret Victor
• Welcome | Future of Coding
• Tom MacWright (@tmcw)
• 55:54 SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ×××

• SwitchBot Wi-Fi Smart Lock

• Val Town

• Scott’s Instagram
• LevelUpTutorials Instagram
• Wes’ Instagram
• Wes’ Twitter
• Wes’ Facebook
• Scott’s Twitter
• Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets
• Wes Bos on Bluesky
• Scott on Bluesky
• Syntax on Bluesky