The Garden
Books, articles, papers, courses, videos, podcasts, and reports I have read, watched or listened to, with a note on each saying why I kept it.
Book
William Zinsser
I spent 3 years editing other writers’ drafts at Kinsta, and this is the book I’d hand any of them on day one. Zinsser shows you how to find the words a sentence doesn’t need and cut them. For instance, there’s the word that does nothing and the adverb that repeats its verb.
Essay / Article
Paul Graham
I read my drafts out loud before they go anywhere, and this essay explains why that works. Most people switch to a stiffer language the moment they start writing, and their readers pay for it. Graham asks whether you’d say the sentence to a friend. If you wouldn’t, rewrite it until you would.
Podcast
Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri
I read nonfiction more carefully because of this show. Hobbes and Shamshiri go through bestsellers from airport bookstores and check each big claim against the research. Often it rests on one small study, stretched far past what it showed. They’re funny about it, too.
Book
Salman Rushdie
Reading India’s history as magical realism felt surreal. Rushdie weaves Saleem’s life through it, from the night of independence to the Emergency and a little after, and you can tell how much research went into it. All of the midnight’s children stayed with me. My favorite chapters are the ones where they’re still kids, growing up.
Video
Rory Sutherland
Sutherland is one of the writers who shaped how I write. In this talk, he shows how changing the way people see a product adds as much value as improving it. For instance, Frederick the Great got Prussians to eat potatoes by making them a royal crop and guarding the field badly enough for people to steal them.
Paper
Dmitry Kobak, Rita González-Márquez, Emőke-Ágnes Horvát, and Jan Lause
“Delve” is on my list of words I don’t use, and this study shows why it belongs there. The researchers counted which words took off in medical abstracts after ChatGPT arrived, and “delves” jumped the most. By their count, at least 13.5% of 2024’s abstracts went through an LLM.
Course
Andre Madarang, Laracasts
I built a video game aggregator by following this course, then deployed it on Kinsta’s application hosting. Madarang builds it with the TALL stack (Tailwind, Alpine.js, Laravel, and Livewire), and you follow along lesson by lesson. By the end you have a working app of your own, and mine is still up on GitHub.
Podcast
Ed Zitron
Zitron explains why so many apps I use every day keep getting worse. He tracks how big tech companies chase growth at the expense of the products people use, and he calls it the rot economy. He also questions how much money is going into generative AI, and he brings numbers to back it up.
Report
HTTP Archive
I used this chapter’s numbers when I wrote about custom WordPress development for rtCamp. In 2025, 45% of WordPress sites passed Core Web Vitals on mobile, up from 28% in 2023. The authors trace most slow sites to how they’re set up, which matches what I saw building test sites for Kinsta’s APM launch.
Other
Mega Crit
I play Slay the Spire II for the lore as much as the fights. You climb the Spire with a deck you build card by card, so every climb plays out differently. The Spire has been dormant for 1,000 years, and each run you finish tells you a little more of its history.
Essay / Article
Wikipedia’s WikiProject AI Cleanup
My own editing checklist is built on this page. Wikipedia’s editors listed the habits that give AI text away, like puffing up how much everything matters and grouping things in threes. You’ll find a few of them in almost any draft, and reading this helps you catch them before your readers do.
Book
Cal Newport
My best writing happens in the hours without interruptions, and this book is Newport’s case for protecting them. He calls it deep work, and it’s getting rarer, so it’s worth more. Some of his rules ask a lot, like quitting social media, and he means every word.
Also Cal Newport’s book page (opens elsewhere) Open Library (opens elsewhere)