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.
7 items Reports
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.
Report
Ryan Law, Ahrefs
This study backed up something I already believed, that writing only to rank is a risky plan. Across 300,000 keywords, the top result got about a third fewer clicks when Google showed an AI Overview. Nearly all of those were how-to and what-is searches, the kind most blogs are built on.
Report
Patchstack
Its numbers went into my rtCamp piece on the WordPress ecosystem. Patchstack counted 7,966 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2024, and 96% of them were in plugins, with only 7 in core. So the security question for your site is which plugins you run and how fast you update them.
Report
Stack Overflow
I write for developers, so I read the trust numbers first. Of the respondents, 84% use or plan to use AI tools, and 46% now distrust what those tools produce, up from 30% a year earlier. Code that’s almost right frustrates 66% of them most, so someone still has to check every line.
Report
FTC staff report
I recognized plenty of these tricks from sites I use. The FTC catalogued the design patterns it considers deceptive, like ads made to look like editorial content and countdown timers on offers that aren’t time-limited. One case shows Credit Karma A/B testing its way to a false “pre-approved” claim because it got more clicks.
Report
Patchstack
This one worried me more than the year before. The 2026 edition found 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, 42% more than in 2024, and 46% had no fix when they went public. Attackers mass-exploited the most targeted ones within a median of 5 hours, so a weekly update routine can’t keep up on its own.
Report
Stanford HAI
I read this to get the numbers behind all the AI headlines. The 2026 edition says capability is still accelerating. Coding benchmark scores jumped in a single year, and generative AI reached about half the population faster than the PC or the internet did. What surprised me most is how differently experts and the public expect AI to turn out.