What happened last week - issue #108
This week: Security, CMS and more
What happened last week
A lot of things are happening lately. First of all my speaker calendar is growing quite quickly:
Cloudfest Security Bootcamp - 19.03
Open Source Day 25 - 21.03
Warsaw IT Days Online - 04.04
WordUp Gdynia - 05.04
WordCamp Vienna - 25.04
At Patchstack, we’re prepping a lot of cool stuff. There will be more webinars, cool special events, and more.
I’m also learning how to use AI more and more for writing code. It really can help a lot if you understand the limitations and some hidden traps.
Also, we had a few days of sun in Poland, so I started my cycling season. Sadly rain and low temperatures are back :/ But those first kilometers in the sun were amazing
Interesting links
Your agency can be a startup within enterprises — Karim Marucchi & Maciek Palmowski
I had the pleasure to talk with Karim about how to build a successful agency. He shared a lot of valuable insights about Open Source, the importance of maintenance, and a lot of other interesting things. You definitely should listen to this.
State of WordPress Security In 2025
At Patchstack we just released the State of WordPress Security report. IMO it’s the best security-related document about WordPress. Some numbers:
7,966 vulnerabilities discovered
43% of all vulnerabilities uncovered in 2024 required no authentication
John Blackbourn received the highest bounty - $16,400
Give it a read - it’s fun.
Why WordPress is a tough sell for marketing students — Marieke van de Rakt
Marieke started teaching at the local university. At some point, she wanted to show marketing students how to build a simple website. And you know what? WordPress is pretty difficult to start with, compared with WIX. Marieke lists some initial barriers that people new to WP might stumble upon.
The Case For Minimal WordPress Setups: A Contrarian View On Theme Frameworks — Kevin Leary
I have mixed feelings about this article. I do agree with the author that simplicity often is much better. On the other hand, as a person using a more complicated framework (not Sage - but inspired), it’s all about the final result. In the long run - using such a standardized framework helped me a lot. Still - love this article as it’s great food for thoughts.
10 Efficient (and Fun) Ways to Seed Your Database — Nico Devs
This great article shows how to seed your database with data. Also, while this article is mainly about Laravel, it can be a great inspiration for how to seed your DB on other frameworks.
Maybe don't use custom properties in shorthand properties — Manuel Matuzović
I never thought about what would happen if you used not-existing custom properties in your CSS. I learned a lot from this.
Musk recently destroyed 18F (I think destroyed is a good word for this). But some of the ex-employees decided it’s not over yet and, quote, “But we came to the government to fix things. And we’re not done with this work yet.”.
This page is under construction — Sophie Koonin
Sophie wrote this great love letter to personal pages. I totally agree with all the points she made in the article.
How I went from 0 to 1M views on Devto: 10 tips and lessons! — Anmol Baranwal
Great tips by Anmol on how to get better at writing. I love his rational approach - no AI, no clickbait, just honest content.
Introducing Slop Stopper: A free content checker for WordPress — Robert DeVore
Robert created a very interesting plugin, especially if you are using a multi-author blog, that helps to flag AI-generated content.
Pruvious, A reliable CMS for your Nuxt site
An interesting CMS for Nuxt. I must give it a try, but it looks interesting.
And how was your week? Did you learn something interesting? Don’t hesitate to press the reply button or share your thoughts in the comment section.
Cheers,
Maciek