#1 — January 2024

Hello!

\n This is the first clipping from my digital garden. I’m still thinking through what I want these to be, but my\n rough idea is an email newsletter that I send every month or two (ish) with a selection of stuff I’ve written\n since the last clipping. I planted a note riffing on{\" \"}\n what I want clippings to be, and I’m also writing about\n {\" \"}\n \n my custom email setup using Val Town\n , if you’re curious.\n

\n There are relatively few of you subscribed, so thanks for being an early reader! Please do{\" \"}\n reply if you feel like it to lmk what you think.\n

Planting my digital garden

\n This clipping will be a bit longer than most because I’m rounding up January 2024 and also looking back on what\n I planted in 2023.\n

\n In the fall I redesigned my personal website as a digital garden. I cover this on my{\" \"}\n about{\" \"}\n page, so I’ll save words here. To learn about digital gardening generally, you can skip right to{\" \"}\n Maggie Appleton’s wonderful essay{\" \"}\n on the ethos and history of digital gardens.\n

\n I wrote about all sorts of stuff last year. Most of it relates to the Web in some way, but there are some bits\n about effective learning and career ambitions mixed in. It’s the first time I’ve consistently written in public,\n which feels good. I still write plenty for myself—the ratio of private to public writing I do is probably like 4\n to 1. Here are some of my personal favorites from 2023:\n

\n \n Edison bulb night mode\n . My coworker Danny linked this in a{\" \"}\n post{\" \"}\n on Hacker News, which generated some helpful feedback and sent me over the Vercel analytics free tier (feeding\n my vanity, ofc)\n

\n \n Silly TLDs\n . This is a short, fun one. It’s the thing I’ve written that friends outside of tech seem most interested\n in / leads to the most fun conversations\n

\n \n My next, next, next job\n . I initially wrote this as a private thought exercise then published it after a nudge from some friends\n who I’d shared it with\n

\n \n Weeks of your life\n . I built{\" \"}\n weeksofyour.life—an interactive visualization of your life in\n weeks—during a couple free days over the holidays. I posted it on{\" \"}\n Show HN, which spurred some heady philosophical\n discussions about the meaning of life and also handy tips around performance (and again—vanity food)\n

\n \n Downloading a 30MB map in the woods\n . This was my first stab at a format I came up with called \"Brainstorms\" where I scribble down a thought\n stream of questions on a topic I’m curious about (sans Internet), then return later to research\n

\n \n Add search to your Next.js static site with Pagefind\n . This project was type 2 fun, and I’m really glad I stuck with it. The Pagefind creator{\" \"}\n added{\" \"}\n my show ’n tell to the Pagefind docs, which felt good\n

\n \n Think small\n . Of all the things I’ve written, this is what pops into my head most day to day, probably because it’s so\n widely applicable\n

January

\n (Here’s where a typical clipping would start.)\n

\n There are six hours left in January as I’m writing this, which leaves enough time to finish writing, cook\n dinner, watch an episode of Chopped, read, and sleep.\n

\n So far this year I’ve planted at least one essay, brainstorm, note, TIL, show ’n tell, and now clipping. That\n wasn’t intentional, and I expect my pace of writing to vary quite a bit throughout the year. Here’s a sampling\n from January:\n

\n I finished reading The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming and{\" \"}\n wrote about it\n

\n I also read and wrote about{\" \"}\n Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham\n

\n I learned about blogrolls and{\" \"}\n added mine\n

\n I also planted an art page and a{\" \"}\n tour of my garden\n

\n I planted{\" \"}\n a brainstorm about how you’d build a terminal in the browser but haven’t finished the research yet to answer\n my questions\n

\n I wrote about my Anki habit, six months in\n

\n I’m still working on my email-course creation tool and the POC first course on the science of learning. I’m\n {\" \"}\n writing about it, and you can{\" \"}\n sign up{\" \"}\n for a very incomplete version of the course if you want to get a feel for the structure\n

\n Thanks for reading! Any feedback is welcome.\n

– Pete

You’re all set!

\n Click here to confirm your subscription. And if you have a minute, reply to this\n email to introduce yourself and lmk why you signed up!\n

\n A lot has happened since{\" \"}\n January. In no particular order...\n

\n\n

Joining Membrane

\n Earlier this year I started exploring{\" \"}\n Membrane, building small programs like the{\" \"}\n feedback form in my garden and a{\" \"}\n solar eclipse countdown. Then a couple\n months later I joined Membrane!\n

\n I ended up here thanks in no small part to{\" \"}\n writing in public{\" \"}\n about what I’m looking for in my next, next-next, and next-next-\n next\n {\" \"}\n jobs. +1 point for blogging.\n

\n The episode with Juan{\" \"}\n on devtools.fm is where I first heard about Membrane—worth a listen if you’re interested in the architecture\n (persisted QuickJS runtime, Rust+WASM, etc). Juan worked on it as a personal project for several years before\n pairing up with Justin as co-founders and transitioning from project to product{\" \"}\n (startup). Our aim is to create a really nice experience writing internal tools with TypeScript.\n

\n I plan to work in public on Membrane with lots of tweets and blog posts. If you’re interested in trying it out,\n I’d love to pair and get your feedback—reply to this email (or DM me on Twitter), and we can set up some time.\n

\n\n

Learning Rust

\n I started{\" \"}\n learning Rust, which I was already interested in and now\n have solid motivation to act on. I plan to{\" \"}\n \n accidentally learn some Computer Science\n {\" \"}\n along the way.\n

\n I’m also starting to dig into WASM, which we’re using for the Membrane Web IDE (egui Rust code compiles to\n WASM).\n

\n\n

Book club, meetup, conference

Future of Coding book club

\n A handful of us started a book club{\" \"}\n in the Future of Coding community. The first book we read was A Small Matter of Programming{\" \"}\n by Bonnie Nardi. I wrote down some{\" \"}\n things I found interesting in the book.\n

\n Initial interest in the book club was good, but to sustain it over time we’ll need new member energy—so come\n join! Or just join the FoC Slack community because all sorts of interesting conversations happen in there.\n

Browsertech NYC in March

\n I also went to and wrote about{\" \"}\n a Browsertech meetup in NYC in March. The browsertech{\" \"}\n newsletter and podcast have become favorites of mine. I hope I can make it to the next NYC edition.\n

ai.engineer World’s Fair

\n Last week I was at the ai.engineer{\" \"}\n World’s Fair in SF. I had the ticket leftover from a generous education budget at my previous job, and I was\n mostly interested in learning about agents.\n

\n To that end, there were interesting talks and workshops from{\" \"}\n Lance Martin,{\" \"}\n Eno Reyes,{\" \"}\n Morgante Pell, and plenty of others. I also\n {\" \"}\n started prototyping{\" \"}\n a simple Membrane agent. Membrane already has a few core building blocks for agents—built-in memory,\n standardized connection to tools (APIs, timers), and really good observability—so that should be a fun area for\n us to continue exploring.\n

\n There were many other engaging talks, like Justine Tunney and Stephen Hood from Mozilla speaking about{\" \"}\n llamafile, which just works{\" \"}\n on almost any hardware completely locally (like, running llama3-8b on my M1 Macbook on-an-airplane locally).\n They also announced funding for{\" \"}\n sqlite-vec, which\n will run vector search on a SQLite db (incl. in WASM).\n

\n\n

Working outside a tech hub

\n I also moved from Brooklyn to Cincinnati for my partner’s work earlier this year. I hadn’t been to Ohio before\n moving here, but Cincy is a legitimately Cool Place. The unsure looks I got at the conference in San Francisco\n last week after answering the “where are you coming from” question reminded me of this DFW quotation from{\" \"}\n Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All:\n

\n \n I’m fresh in from the East Coast to go to the Illinois State Fair for a swanky East-Coast magazine. Why\n exactly a swanky East-Coast magazine is interested in the Illinois State Fair remains unclear to me. I suspect\n that every so often editors at these magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90% of the United\n States lies between the Coasts and figure they’ll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological\n reporting on something rural and heartlandish.\n \n

\n So I’m starting to accrue perspective on working in software while living outside a tech hub. There aren’t\n weekly meetups like you have in NYC and SF, but there are engineers around if you look closely! And you can\n start your own meetups (something I’d like to do soon). I’ll also fly into NYC every couple months to go to a\n meetup and catch up with friends. Plus, I’m just leaning more into making connections online (e.g. FoC book\n club). I’ll also try to attend at least a couple conferences per year.\n

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Thanks for reading.

- Pete

#1 — January 2024

Planting my digital garden

January

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Sign up for clippings from Pete's garden (petemillspaugh.com)

Joining Membrane

Learning Rust

Book club, meetup, conference

Future of Coding book club

Browsertech NYC in March

ai.engineer World’s Fair

Working outside a tech hub

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