Digital gardener, mostly writing about frontend-y Web stuff.
Unlike previous clippings , this one is organized Robin Sloan newsletter -style: instead of neatly partitioned sections of what I’ve written and what I’ve read, it’s a stream of discrete vignettes from the past couple months. I read the phrase epistemic vigilance in Jane Friedman’s piece on AI and Libraries: Why Librarians May Become Arbiters of Reality . It’s a fancy but perfectly precise way to…
I think “abottom” would be a useful word. It’s more economical than “at the bottom” People will quickly get it via its analogue “atop” Per Google’s Ngram View, atop only sprouted up in the last century , and abottom usage is near-zero but not zero (seven 0s to the right of the decimal). I’m going to start using it, and I invite you to join me. Let’s get this thing (back) in the dictionary.
Charles Dickens from the Victorian era of the 1800s is legendary not only for his writing but also for how he released his work in multiple formats, modified his stories based on audience feedback, and masterfully used the serial to garner attention and publicity. -Jane Friedman, The Business of Being a Writer I read this paragraph today, and my casual interest in Dickens’ publishing history came…
As April turns to May, I’m sending my seventh clipping from the garden: a collection of what I’ve been writing and reading since December . And before that, if I could quickly break the fourth wall: reply to this email if you wouldn’t mind. I’m sending from a new address, and replies help build its reputation so that future email won’t be condemned to spam. (Or you can of course unsubscribe at the…
I read the phrase epistemic vigilance in Jane Friedman’s piece, AI and Libraries: Why Librarians May Become Arbiters of Reality . It’s a fancy but precise way to describe something I’ve been thinking about for a while: AI hallucinations and slop introduce a tax on our learning—before believing what we read, we must judge where that knowledge came from and whether it’s credible, accurate, true.…
I read Draft No. 4 by John McPhee. On chronology versus theme After ten years of it at Time and The New Yorker , I felt both rutted and frustrated by always knuckling under to the sweep of chronology, and I longed for a thematically dominated structure. (24) A couple months ago, I read Alia Hanna Habib quoting Andrea Elliott quoting Benjamin Weiser about the importance of keeping a master timeline…
I read Evicted by Matthew Desmond for a book club at the wonderful Mercantile Library . It’s astounding how much work went into this book, evident in book itself but especially after reading the epilogue and acknowledgements. I am impressed by how thorough and exact his reporting is—always precise quotes, digitally recorded or transcribed; delivered as factually as possible; empathetic but without…
From Sally Mann's Art Work , in her chapter on killing your darlings (emphasis mine): Sure, they’re your darlings, but if they’re not good enough, send them straight to the choppy-chop. Faulkner was right about that, even if he wasn’t the originator of the famous quote...and didn’t necessarily think he needed to apply it to his own writing; if one thing in your creative career will define…
I read Take It From Me by Alia Hanna Habib. Another good candidate for writer’s book club at the Mercantile Library, after we read Jane Friedman’s The Business of Being a Writer . Or perhaps after The Design of Books by Debbie Berne. Thanks to Harrison Hill for recommending Alia’s book. Harrison’s first book, The Oracle’s Daughter , comes out in April. Buy it! On interviewing Alia conducted over…
I am reading The Design of Books by Debbie Berne. For any authors, especially if you are self-publishing, this book is just so good. It is a good candidate for the writers' book club at the Mercantile Library, after we read Jane Friedman's The Business of Being a Writer . These notes are rough and incomplete, for now. The design of books What goes into the design of books? And I mean…
I read the phrase “unhurried ambition” in Alia Hanna Habib’s Take It From Me , and it stuck in my head. Right now I’m working a part-time job (that I really like!) while writing my book the other days. I wish each day were twice as long, and I wish I could be full-time on both at once. It’s a good problem to have, of course, but the risk is that I feel like I’m always behind. That time is moving…
I read Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. It’s one of those face-the-music books that I’d recommend to almost anyone, whether you work in tech or not. One thing I kept wondering: are all the quotations in the book—or any whistleblowing book like it—approximated from Sarah’s memory? Did she take loads of notes, or find recorded meetings (which still wouldn’t cover everything)? When did she…
I re-read A Gentleman in Moscow with the Zillenial book club at the Mercantile Library here in Cincinnati. After discussing the book, the group went to the Metropole (with an “e”) hotel bar a couple streets north, well chosen what with the entire book set in the Metropol (no “e”) hotel in Moscow. I couldn’t make it to the Metropole, sadly, but I walked by a week later and started thinking about…
I’m reading Writing for Developers by Cynthia Dunlop and Piotr Sarna with the Overcommitted podcast book club . We’re two weeks in, and so far we’ve read chapters 1, 2, 3, and 8. On patterns In the same way that this book identifies patterns of blog posts (“Bug Hunt”, “Rewrote It in X”), it might be helpful to collect a list of snowclones to be used as titles. Like, I’m using The secret life of X…
I don’t work nor think in fiscal quarters, but this clipping happens to cover what I’ve written and read in Q4 2025. And a new job! Joining Val Town I’ve been working for Val Town ~one day per week for the past few months. Starting today, I’m officially joining the team as a part-timer—three days a week—while I continue to work on my book the other four. I’ve been a Val Town customer and fan for…
I continue to have lots of cognitive dissonance about what Twitter has become —so X, I guess—and whether I should leave. It’s one tool among many for getting the word out about my book and DM’ing people I want to interview. On the one hand, people who I respect have left for good reasons , and I already think future me will wonder why I waited so long. But on the other hand, some people who I…
This essay was originally published on janefriedman.com. Earlier this year I left a job I liked at an early stage startup to write a book. To most people I talk to that sounds like quite a leap, but the nature of the work has been surprisingly similar. Since I started writing dot com et al: the secret life of domains , I have been searching for book-market fit , just as startups search for…
When you’re buying a couch, you want three things. Your couch should be: Comfortable Stylish Affordable Pick two. The point is that buying a couch involves tradeoffs . It’s like Halloween, where you want a costume that’s: Clever Easy Flattering Again, tradeoffs. Tradeoffs are everywhere. It’s one of those mental models that is absolutely everywhere once in your head. Nearly every decision you…
I read Bibliotech by John Palfrey. This is one of those books that’s best read hot out of the oven (i.e. shortly after it’s published). I kept wanting to know what’s happened in the decade since he wrote it, in 2015. It’s probably not the best book about libraries out there. It was ok, but I stuck with it more because I’m interested in the subject matter than because I thought it was especially…
To be written, maybe. I planted a seed for this essay in my notes on attention while reading The World Beyond Your Head .
I read The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford. The book was a bit beyond my head at times. I thought much of the writing was too fancy for its own good, standing in the way of good ideas. Maybe that’s unavoidable in philosophy, I don’t know. But the ideas were good, and sticking with it was worthwhile. I kept pausing to think and write things down, which is one sign of a good book. It…
Instead of writing down books I want to read on a list, I’ve started directly placing holds at my local public library. I think it’s a better system. Here’s how it works: When you’re interested in a book, place a hold at your library. Pick up books whenever you’re near the library. Leave books around your apartment/house. Bedside table, coffee table, kitchen table. Read a chapter here, a chapter…
Bob Nystrom is a programmer-writer who wrote a book titled Crafting Interpreters then wrote a blog post about writing the book called Crafting “Crafting Interpreters” . This is a blog post about that blog post. I’m writing this sort of because I couldn’t pass up the recursive title (credit to my friend Tom Robbins), but really because I’m writing and self-publishing a book about domains and want…
My favorite label right now for what I do 1 is programmer-writer . I first saw it in Jason Kehe’s WIRED profile of Robin Sloan. The article is titled “The Tech World’s Greatest Living Novelist Goes Meta,” and it’s not just a profile—it’s a profile about profiling Sloan, mostly full of Kehe’s inner monologue: Just give him some impressive-sounding title that can’t be ignored. “The quintessential…
I read Art Work by Sally Mann. On the flight to ICANN84 I’d finished the only book I brought, so I walked around a bookstore in Dublin to find a book that I’d want to own (I usually read a library copy before buying) but hadn’t read yet. There was a full-table spread of Art Work on the second floor. An American photographer from Virginia on a table in Ireland. The book’s packaging is well done:…
I read This Is for Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee. Published in 2025. It’s his second book and a good, natural follow-up to Weaving the Web . Notes These are unpolished, raw notes I jotted down while reading. Tim Berners-Lee (“TBL” from here on) was 34 years old when he proposed the Web in 1989. He released the first website ( info.cern.ch ) in December 1990 (not 1991 like I’d thought for some…
A year ago I visited my 37th state , New Mexico. Then in April, 38 : Texas. Today I stopped in Indiana—number 39—on the way from Chicago to Cincinnati. Some people I talk to only “count” a state if they’ve spent the night. My (revised) criteria is that I’ve stopped for a meal or to check out a landmark—something that gives me some sense of the place. Airports don’t count. I stopped for an hour or…
Interviewing people for my book has been so much fun. One startup COO I interviewed took two <24 hour round-trip flights to Italy during peak COVID to persuade a Swedish company to sell their domain for six figures, only to have the money go missing for a couple months after the seller sent the wrong banking wire instructions. That story and interview will likely end up in an email newsletter,…
Paul Graham wrote 10 years ago that your startup ought to have a dot com domain . A lot has changed since then, but he still thinks there’s no excuse for not having one . PG is certainly more qualified to offer startup advice than I am, but a startup domain search is typically more nuanced than taking ten minutes to rebrand with a five-letter dot com . I gave a conference talk on this topic at…
I read Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee. Published in 2000. It’s his first book and a good, natural precursor to This Is for Everyone . Notes These are unpolished, raw notes I jotted down while reading. The Web was a side project, not TBL’s main work at CERN (for a while, at least). He gave talks and demos to whoever would listen and wrote about it in a newsletter. *** Domains preceded the web.…
In July I announced my book about domains , so I’m about two months into full-time independent work (with a bit of travel mixed in). It has been quite fun so far—most days I seem to look up and it’s already dinnertime. I’ve been telling friends who ask how it’s going that maybe I’m still in the honeymoon phase and that it’ll feel like Work soon enough, but now I’m not so sure. The reading and…
Friends keep asking me what my writing process is for my book . Recently I realized that I like to write in the act of learning . While I’m reading a blog or book or listening to a podcast, I’ll instinctively go off and start writing down my questions and connecting the thing to other things I know. My best writing often comes naturally when I’m in a learning flow. The point is to harness creative…
I read On Writing by Stephen King. On King and Kingsolver’s band You don’t even have to read the book to learn my favorite bio factoid on King—it’s right there in the preface, which I read at Bookery months before I read the book. Stephen King was in a rock-and-roll band called The Rock Bottom Remainders with Barbara Kingsolver and other writers in San Francisco in the nineties. Barb on keys and…
As of this month, petemillspaugh.com is no longer a space for only web dev and adjacent topics. I decided to open it up to all of my writing and projects. I’d originally planned to create a separate blog for such things, but an eventual merge felt inevitable. You can find links to dozens of new, varied notes and essays down below. This month also marks a new, energizing career direction for me.…
I read The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. The first few Areas of Thought (chapters) are so similar to The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron that I would be shocked if Cameron wasn’t a major influence. Or maybe there are certain artistic, creative Truths that one arrives at independently. The book is cut up into 78 vignettes on creativity that flow sequentially but can also stand alone. In that way it…
I noticed a phenomenon—well, idk if I can call it that yet until I think of more examples—kinda like Square Theory . Not similar structurally to ST, just similar in that it’s another observation about the relationship between words or expressions. I was writing the expression “I sound like a broken record” as in something that I’ve repeated over and over, but for a pleasing derivative I rewrote it…
I read Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. The book is interesting enough despite Bourdain being unlikable. I didn’t like him most of the time while reading, at least. He’s opinionated and sure of himself and vulgar, and he glamorizes toxic behavior. I’m an outsider to his world, and that might be just the reaction he expects, but I can only imagine many insiders would be even more appalled.…
I appreciated reading one runner’s review of the Flying Pig Marathon before I ran , so I thought I’d record race notes of my own. Alas, I didn’t get around to writing anything up while the race was fresh in my mind, but here’s a pre-race thought stream on hills, at least. Cincinnati’s course is actually hillier than Boston. ~1,200ft elevation gain compared to ~800ft. I haven’t run Boston, but…
This is a collection of words I or others made up— shwords (another word I made up)—plus observations on real words I come across. Shwords Shwords can be hard to come up with. Most reasonable combinations of consonnants and vowels are already spoken for, and ones that aren’t often sound too adjacent to a real word. For example, you might come up with “carn” only to decide that it sounds like…
In October I wrote about my 37th state , New Mexico. I’m continuing the tradition here with #38, Texas. I visited Dallas for a weekend, half of which was not like I pictured (green, posh, felt like LA) and half of which was just like I pictured (pulled pork sandwich, rodeo in Fort Worth). Indiana is about a half hour from my house, so I really ought to go there for #39. I did drive through Indiana…
Each time I run a marathon, I change one or two variables about how I train. I think of them as cards up my sleeve, or levers. Eventually I’ll run out of these low hanging fruits that drive step function improvement—as in, clear cut PRs—and the gains will be marginal. My biggest lever yet was switching to a vegan diet for the 2025 Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati. I started eating mostly vegan in…
Cincinnatians: We’re holding a writer’s book club centered around Jane’s book, starting in May 2026 at the wonderful Mercantile Library. Please do join and tell your writer friends! And email me if you’re interested but can’t make the times. I read The Business of Being a Writer by Jane Friedman. I found out about this book through an event at the Mercantile Library , my favorite local place to…
David Foster Wallace is my favorite writer (and I know that’s a massive cliché ). It’s not the plot or subject matter that I like about his work. It’s the writing. One of my favorite things about DFW’s writing is how he takes fuzzy or inconcrete thoughts, concepts, or feelings and somehow translates them into words. Like, take this passage from Authority and American Usage : It is sometimes…
When I am going through a rough patch, I like to trade ambition for presence . When things are going well, it’s energizing to think about the future, to plan, to dream, to have ambition. But when things are hard, I find it helpful to center on the present and filter out the past and future, if only temporarily. Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way talks about paying attention to now when there’s pain…
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff was the first “self-help” book I ever read, before I knew the genre existed, or that it was taboo and rebranded as “self-development.” It was given to me by an educator influential in my life—I wouldn’t explicitly say mentor, but certainly someone I deeply admire and respect. I’m not sure how deliberate the gift was. He just plucked it off the shelf as we were talking,…
I started eating ~90% vegan in early February of this year. I was reading How Not To Die at the time while traveling, and that trip’s menu was pretty much how to die according to Greger’s gospel. But food is sacred, and I’m of multiple hearts and minds about the whole vegan thing. I say 90% vegan, and that pretty much means preparing only vegan meals for myself and being flexible when I’m with…
There are some daily activities that force us to unplug, like driving and showering. You shouldn’t use your phone while driving (although maps, music, etc. can mean it isn’t totally screen-free). And have you ever tried taking a phone call in the shower? Showering and driving are good times to think. Spielberg apparently did his best thinking while driving on the highway. I read that in The…
I love what I think of as “orderly maximalist” design. Lots of stuff everywhere, a rainbow of colors and textures, but neat. I’d like to see orderly maximalist websites. Ones with lots of content, color, and decoration. Less open space and minimalist icons (which I do enjoy when done right, too!). Websites created using mmm.page tend to be maximalist, but not always orderly (there are exceptions,…
I think about present me in relation to past and future me often. Generalized, I think of this concept as present you. Present you has a set of interests and desires. Because you want those things at this moment, you also want future you to want those things. You might even wish past you had also wanted those things so you’d be farther along by now. Past you is somewhat powerless because what’s…
This is half a decade late, but I still own a MATH hat and think about Andrew Yang’s run for president in 2020 occasionally. I don’t know if I’ll ever turn this thought stream into a more refined political essay, but (like much of what I write) I’m planting it here for some catharsis. MATH = Make America Think Harder. It was Yang’s 2020 campaign slogan. It’s a clever response to MAGA, and I loved…