About
About me
I’m Pete. I’m a programmer and writer. Right now I’m writing a book about the secret life of Internet domains and working part-time for Val Town. I live in Cincinnati, Ohio.
About this digital garden
This website is a digital garden, which is a bit different than a blog where each post is a “finished” work ready for public eyes. Instead, I might plant the seed of an essay, give it some sun, water it, tend to it, etc. I owe most of my gardening inspiration to Maggie Appleton for her amazing garden and essay on its history and ethos.
Writing formats
My garden is organized by writing formats and growth stages. I have six formats:
- Essays: longform thinking, typically not technical
- Brainstorms: raw thought stream scribbled down without Internet connection, followed by a debrief pointing out what I got right and wrong
- Show n’ tells: write-ups on how I built a thing. Not quite as step-by-step nor broadly applicable as a classic “tutorial”, usually
- Clippings: email newsletters every N months. I propagate writing planted since the last clipping and write about what I’m up to / what I’ve read recently
- Notes: catch-all for writing that doesn’t fit into another category. Could start as small as a Tweet or grow large enough to re-pot as an essay
- TILs: Today I Learned. Small tidbits that I come across and jot down quickly. Inspired by Josh Branchaud’s TIL repo
Growth stages
Each piece of content also has a growth stage, which I borrowed directly from Maggie:
- Seedlings: young, unrefined ideas that I’ve just planted—or old ones that need watering. If I am a diligent gardener, they’ll grow into Buddings and Evergreens
- Buddings: maturing works that I’ve come back to tend to, water, and prune. They’ve outgrown Seedling status and may someday grow into Evergreens
- Evergreens: complete works that I have edited and published as a cohesive whole. They are similar to a traditional blog post published at a point in time in that way
I quite like metaphors, and I’ve spent time brainstorming my own growth stages metaphor to use in place of Maggie’s, but as yet nothing resonates with me quite as much as plant growth. It is a garden, after all. Greenery evokes a positive feeling, and the metaphor stretches really well: I can water my plants (write), prune them (edit), give them some sun (think), or even re-pot—a Note into an Essay, for example.
The code for my garden is public. You can read about my tech stack in the readme.