Val Town

Val Town is a social website to code in the cloud. You can create APIs, scheduled functions, email yourself, and persist data.

Our mission is end-user programming. We believe everyone should be able to code.

We’re building a social hub where people can write code without friction or setup: open a tab, write JavaScript, and click run. You can learn more about us at val.town/about.

We’re a small team that ships. We’re crafting a simple, powerful product that programmers love — come join us!

What you’ll do

You will generate and own the design vision for Val Town. On a typical day, you’ll be improving our design system, creating low-fidelity wireframes in tldraw or Figma, talking to users, or implementing a crucial UI detail in our product. Our website aims to be user-friendly, usable on mobile, and also powerful enough for advanced users. The design challenges that this entails are deep and wide: combining a full-fledged TypeScript IDE with a social website that feels approachable to everyone. You’ll collaborate with the whole team to ship frequent, incremental improvements that make Val Town more engaging, polished, and joyful.

You

You have a passion for creating elegant and powerful tools that users love.

You have a great sense for user interface design. You can see around the corners to think through multi-step interactions.

You’re a designer at heart, but can write a first implementation of a design in React and Tailwind – or the motivation to learn how.

You know when to be inventive and when to learn from prior art. (We are very enthusiastic about cataloguing and learning from prior art. Tom keeps a collection of hundreds of UI element screenshots.)

You are self-directed, take ownership, and are up for whatever’s needed on a particular day.

You have good product sense, care deeply about making customers happy, and have had some sort of success shipping something on your own — a blog, open source project, etc.

You are committed to kindness, integrity, and doing the right thing.

Your skills and experiences:

Managing a design system
Strong command of Figma, Sketch, Penplot, or tldraw
Good writing and communication skills
Strong knowledge of CSS fundamentals. We use Tailwind, but that doesn’t save us from needing to know the ins and outs of grid and flexbox layout, margin collapsing, and advanced selectors. We try to do as much in CSS instead of JavaScript, where possible.
Ability to implement designs in React and Tailwind. You don’t have to be a master programmer — we’re here to help make your designs a reality — but we’re a small team, so the more you can do on your own, the better.