more doodling on the job 😌

Why are there so many C words in AI? Claude Code, ChatGPT, Cursor, Copilot... I noticed that all the Townie slash commands in @val.town start with /c ...which maybe @jxnblk.bsky.social did on purpose?

a favorite part of my new job is getting to* doodle for blog posts, like this octocat (drawn with my mouse in @excalidraw.com lol) *not just getting to, but encouraged to

shower thought: pre-mortems for books in the form of scathing reviews

My latest obsession has been optimising webhook events from Ghost to Netlify. I needed a way to filter out large payloads sent to Netlify. Using @val.town as a webhook middleware, I can strip payloads and skip triggering builds for certain posts. jonathanyeong.com/writing/usin...

To start 2026 I officially joined @stevekrouse.com, @macwright.com, and co. at @val.town as a programmer-writer, part-time while I continue writing my book :) Val Town's founding poem is still my favorite way to describe what it is: > If GitHub Gists could run > And AWS Lambda were fun

> John worked to make a format that was so simple that anybody could pick it up in a few minutes, and powerful enough that it could help people express pretty much anything that they wanted to include while writing on the internet. *End user programming!* Like spreadsheets

New achievement unlocked: guest post on @janefriedman.com's site! I've learned so much about books and publishing from Jane's work (and reading her book was what planted the idea in my head to write mine!)

Reading about @dpla.bsky.social in John Palfrey’s book Bibliotech, and they use a nifty domain hack! dp.la (which is the ccTLD for Laos)

a christmas re-gift a from-you-to-me-to-you-from-me gift

Just joined this (and ordered @cynthiadunlop.bsky.social and Piotr's book) on a whim - very glad I did :) If you're a (practicing or aspiring) programmer-writer, come join for the next one!

I've started directly placing holds at my local library, bypassing a want-to-read book list petemillspaugh.com/library-holds

📢 Introducing The Val Town MCP Server Bring Val Town to your favorite LLM – Cursor, ChatGPT, Zed, wherever! AI coding, instant deployments, built-in SQLite For example, here we use Claude Code to make a blog in a couple prompts Learn more & get started 👉 blog.val.town/mcp

ICANN is not a boring bureaucracy: internet governance drama buried in acronyms dotcom.press/archive/icann84 Writing about ICANN reminded me of my favorite David Foster Wallace essay, Authority and American Usage ("Did you know that US lexicography even *had* a seamy underbelly?")

I put together a timeline of domain history from DNS to 2026 gTLDs. Inspired by @deno.land's Brief History of JS and @neal.fun's Internet Artifacts (which is amazing if you haven't read through it before!) dotcom.press/history-of-domains

@terrenceobrien.bsky.social's article on Twitter's secondary marketplace for handles reminds me of the secondary market for domain names, including the perpetual renewal cost theverge.com/news/802474/x-is-launching-a-marketplace-for-inactive-handles

By a strange coincidence Anguilla is the country where AI has had the biggest (proportional) economic impact so far... dotcom.press/archive/anguilla

September petemillspaugh.com/september-2025

August 2025 petemillspaugh.com/august-2025

Wholesale domains dotcom.press/archive/wholesale-domains

@b0rk.jvns.ca's How DNS Works is a treasure chest of technical domain rabbit holes for dotcom.press (my favorite being root-servers.org)

I wrote about my "why" in this month's garden clipping: petemillspaugh.com/july-2025

I'm writing a book!

TIL Amazon has a domain registry (AWS "Route 53")

I’m rooting for a JavaScript Conference 2026 sponsored by @deno.land 🤞 deno.com/blog/deno-v-oracle3 (Sign the petition if you haven’t already!)

I took for granted that browser default styles wouldn’t change, but: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/h1-element-styles One point for having a heavy CSS reset and adding back default margins etc

I just finished Eat & Run, and I read Born to Run and How Not to Die before that. Looking for more books in that theme (eating plants, running)

Came across two more lovely spins on @busterbenson.com's busterbenson.com/life-in-weeks @ginatrapani.org's weeks.ginatrapani.org and Rafał Pastuszak's days.sonnet.io

I haven't heard much about Remix lately, but turns out React Router still has more monthly downloads than Next.js (47M vs 32M in Jan '25)

Love this. The Alan Kay story reminds me of some cold emails I'm very glad I sent

"wormcan" might be a good name for a muck raking journalism company/publication

I've been experimenting with a "brainstorm" format in my garden where I dump out an offline thought stream then follow up with some light research. I had fun learning about JS specs, engines and runtimes here petemillspaugh.com/javascript-engines-and-runtimes

I'd forgotten that you can throttle CPU in browser devtools Performance tab like you can emulate slower connections in the Network tab. Pretty useful

One of my favorite LLM use cases is chat with docs. Stripe has had it for a while, and I just noticed Vercel has it (experimental). Quite useful

I'd love it if there were tons of mini dev courses that combined the high quality and hands-on structure of @joshwcomeau.com's courses with the bite-size utility of @b0rk.jvns.ca's zines

My main programming languages: 2021: JavaScript 2022-: TypeScript ...earlier this year I thought 2024 might be Rust, but I haven't truly gotten deep into Rust yet

dot com et al petemillspaugh.com/dot-com

(TIL) Rust raw strings - pretty clever/satisfying design, I think petemillspaugh.com/rust-raw-strings

I discovered voice doppelgängers on two unrelated podcasts I listen to. Since I assume you all have never heard of one another, @beryllove.bsky.social meet @tolin.ski (I actually think Beryl's voice is a combination of Scott's and the actor Adam Scott)

Is there a Rust equivalent of justjavascript.com by @danabra.mov and @maggieappleton.com? I'd love going through a _Just Rust_

Is it possible to somehow see domain registrar searches? I saw a domain available on Cloudflare this morning, and now it's spoken for 🤔