December 2025

\n I don’t work nor think in fiscal quarters, but this clipping happens to\n cover what I’ve written and read in Q4 2025. And a new job!\n

Joining Val Town

\n I’ve been working for Val Town{\" \"}\n ~one day per week for the past few months. Starting today, I’m\n officially joining the team as a part-timer—three days a week—while I\n continue to work on my book the other four. I’ve been a Val Town\n customer and fan for as long as I’ve been writing in my garden—just hit\n {\" \"}\n cmd+k{\" \"}\n and search “Val” on petemillspaugh.com for plenty of evidence there.\n This very email will be sent using a system I created in Val Town. My\n excitement for the VT product pretty much boils down to{\" \"}\n \n being into end-user programming\n {\" \"}\n and working on{\" \"}\n \n end-programmer programming\n . That pairs well with my excitement to work with the VT team, whose\n blog posts always seem to be open in my browser tabs. It’s a good chance\n to become a better writer and programmer. And as it turns out, I kind of\n called it in{\" \"}\n \n My next, next, next job\n .\n

Writing

\n I wrote a guest essay for Jane Friedman’s blog:{\" \"}\n \n Write Your Book Like You’d Run a Startup\n . It’s the first time my writing has been published by someone else,\n and I’m honored that the someone else is Jane Friedman. Jane is the\n writers’ writer. As I wrote about in{\" \"}\n July, her talk\n at the Mercantile Library and her book,{\" \"}\n The Business of Being a Writer, planted the idea in my head to\n write a book of my own.\n

Writing from my garden in Q4:

\n \n The nature of the job\n \n
\n A cathartic essay about a programmer’s relationship with AI\n
\n \n Public library holds as your want-to-read book list\n \n
\n Skip the list and walk to your local library\n
\n \n Interpreting Crafting Crafting Interpreters\n \n
\n A blog post about a blog post about a book\n
\n \n The couch problem\n \n
\n On tradeoffs\n
\n \n I’ve been to 39 US states\n \n
\n Green grass and blue skies in Indiana\n
\n \n Programmer-writer\n \n
\n What would you say you do here?\n

Writing for my book in Q4:

\n \n A Brief History of Domains\n \n
\n This year, dot com turned 40\n
\n \n You can’t spell Anguilla without AI\n \n
\n \n AI’s economic impact on Anguilla is second to none, but why should\n we world care?\n \n
\n \n ICANN is not a boring bureaucracy\n \n
\n Internet governance drama buried in acronyms\n
\n r/domains\n
\n Earn an MBA for domains on Reddit\n
\n \n Holiday gift guide: domains for the whole family\n \n
\n \n This holiday season, buy your friends and family their own corner of\n the internet\n \n

Reading

Books I read in Q4, with some links pointing to notes I collected:

\n Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson\n
\n Algospeak by Adam Aleksic\n
\n Declaring Independence in Cyberspace by Milton Mueller\n
\n Bootstrapping Computing by Alexander Obenauer\n
\n \n The World Beyond Your Head\n {\" \"}\n by Matthew B. Crawford\n
\n \n Bibliotech\n {\" \"}\n by John Palfrey\n
\n \n Art Work\n {\" \"}\n by Sally Mann\n
\n \n This Is For Everyone\n {\" \"}\n by Tim Berners-Lee\n

\n Plus two books I read earlier this year and just recently planted notes\n for:\n

\n \n Weaving the Web\n {\" \"}\n by Tim Berners-Lee\n
\n \n On Writing\n {\" \"}\n by Stephen King\n

Why bother?

\n I was re-reading Bob Nystrom’s essay, “Crafting *Crafting\n Interpreters*,” about writing his book,{\" \"}\n Crafting Interpreters, and I decided to turn my notes into my\n own blog post about the blog post: “Interpreting Crafting Crafting\n Interpreters” (linked above). After writing it, I thought to myself, why\n do I bother writing this kind of thing? It felt like I’d wasted my time,\n maybe.\n

\n Part of the reason why I’d write something like that is because{\" \"}\n \n a blog post is a very long and complex search query to find\n fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox\n , as Henrik Karlsson wrote. I want to route fascinating\n people—self-publishing authors—and interesting stuff—books, blogs,\n ideas—to my inbox. I also want to route recursively-titled meta blog\n posts to my inbox because I really like this kind of behind-the-scenes,\n story-of-the-craft writing. Like my friend Danny’s{\" \"}\n \n Making Make a README\n {\" \"}\n and Jason Kehe’s{\" \"}\n \n WIRED profile\n {\" \"}\n about profiling{\" \"}\n Robin Sloan, which he almost but didn’t title “The programmer-writer’s\n programmer-writer.”\n

\n Planting blog posts as long, complex search queries is similar to why\n I’d want a bigger network of friends{\" \"}\n on Twitter{\" \"}\n and Bluesky. Not for vanity or selling books—although of course that’s\n nice—but so that I can ask questions and get useful answers that help me\n find people and their work, like{\" \"}\n \n Steve’s tweet about domain brokers\n {\" \"}\n that led to three (!) great conversations for my book. I’ve been\n thinking a lot about getting other people’s antennae up as I write my\n book. Because I’m writing about domains,{\" \"}\n \n my antenna is up\n {\" \"}\n and ready to notice anything related to domains that I stumble upon. If\n I can get others’ antennae up, that will route more domain stories to my\n inbox. That’s (partially) why I send{\" \"}\n emails for the book{\" \"}\n every couple weeks.\n

\n I’m also a believer that to write better you need to write{\" \"}\n more. It’s all practice, in a sense. And on that note, please\n do reply to this email. I’ll write back.\n