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#3 — July 2025

  • Planted:

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.

Leaving Membrane

I decided to leave Membrane to write a book. More on the book in a moment.

I joined Membrane in June of last year. It was a good year! Much of what I wrote about in My next, next, next job came true, namely learning a lot from a supportive, engaged team with a shared love for programming.

I had the chance to learn a bit of Rust working on the Membrane IDE and backend. I enjoyed learning Rust and making my first real code contributions in a programming language other than JavaScript. I also learned that what I really crave and love is the Web platform, i.e. investing fully in JS, HTML, CSS, and Web APIs, which I plan to do more of.

I met many smart people through user interviews and candidate interviews when we were hiring. I got to make some neat Membrane programs for dogfooding and demos. I learned a lot about UX while iterating on our onboarding, documentation, and website. I kept up our weekly(ish) changelog and wrote a handful of blog posts and recorded tutorial videos, like Testing email verification, Stripe subscriptions, Slack signup alerts, Hono API sans db, Public roadmap, Automating changelogs, GitHub issue watcher and PostgreSQL admin dashboard.

It was a worthwhile year, and it wasn’t easy leaving a team that I really liked spending time with. If you’re interested in internal tools, Rust, or graph-based UIs, give Membrane a try and tell Juan what you think.

A book!

I am writing a book about Internet domains: dot com et al. The book has its own home on the Web at dotcom.press. It will cover the history, economics, and artistry of domains.

My why for the book splits roughly into four whys:

  • I love to write, more so over time
  • I’m fascinated by domain names
  • I’m curious about the creative process of self-publishing
  • I’m eager to meet Internet people and hear their domain stories

This is not some lifelong dream realized—it snuck up on me over a couple months until I was too excited not to do it. Back on April 8, I went to an event on a whim at the wonderful Mercantile Library for Jane Friedman’s book, The Business of Being a Writer. Hundreds of published and aspiring authors (which did not include me at the time) were in the audience. Jane’s talk was fascinating, covering topics like the staying power of print, traditional publishing deals versus self-publishing, and building your platform in walled gardens like Twitter and Substack versus your own website/newsletter. After the event I started reading my freshly signed copy of Jane’s book, sometimes applying her lessons to my own experience as a blogger, but mostly reading out of detached curiosity. This is super interesting, but I’m not going to write a book. What would I even write about? That is, until it clicked. Domains!

Domains is the subject I kept coming back to. I’ve written a few wandering, wondering notes in my garden: dot com et al (where I borrowed the working title of the book), Silly TLDs, and Serious TLDs. I own nearly two dozen domains, many of which were gifts to friends and family. I want everyone to have their own corner of the Internet, and that starts with a domain. I’m interested in topics like how registrars work, creating new gTLDs, geopolitic risk around ccTLDs, customer trust w/r/t unusual TLDs, investing in domains, pricing domains, legal battles, and branding centered around a domain name. The book won’t be technical, but I anticipate that it will naturally appeal more to programmers and other Web-interested people.

I’m also quite excited for what a book entails outside of the writing itself. The barrier to self-publishing is low these days, and I see it as a deeply creative process. There may even be a timeline where I extend my newly established publishing company, Dot Com Press, LLC, to publish books for others. I plan to build interactive elements on the book’s website and publish across many formats: the expected ones like print, ebook, and audiobook, but also serialized as a podcast and email newsletter with one chapter per week.

Probably the most fun I’ll have along the way will be interviewing people. Pretty much anyone who’s worked around the Web has some story to tell or article to share about a domain. On that note, reply to this email! Interviews can be as informal as you’d like, from casually brainstorming to recording a story that ends up as its own book chapter.

This isn’t a transition away from web development, either. I want to code more, if anything. I don’t know if I’ll write another book after this, but I do expect to keep coding as my Main Thing, and that excites me.

What I’m reading

I’ve read some great books in 2025 (and some just-ok ones). For each I’ve included a Bookshop.org affiliate link, a rating, who might like it, and notes if I wrote any. Many of these can be found on my brand new bookshelf.

I just signed up as a Bookshop.org affiliate, which means I earn a 10% commission on profit if you buy one. I expect to earn no more than a burrito’s worth every few months, but regardless of my affiliation I think Bookshop.org is a terrific Amazon alternative and way to support independent book stores.

What I’m writing

Outside of books I’m reading and the book I’m writing, I’ve planted notes here and there in my garden. Embarrassingly, it’s been a full year since I’ve sent this “monthly-ish” clippings newsletter, but I suppose that’s the nature of gardening. So I’ll end this already-long clipping with an incomplete list of things I wrote since last June:

Thanks for reading. If you have any domain tales or resources to share, reach out.

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