We've all seen design patterns and heard about best practices in PHP development, but there's a darker, more sinister side to the "practices" examples that is usually just the stuff of folklore and legend. Many a PHP developer brushes off their existence with a quick "oh, I'd never do that" or "I've seen other people's code like that..."

What am I talking about? Why, only the very things that threaten to tear apart the language and the community as a whole! That's right - PHP Worst Practices - and they'll sneak into your development as quick as you can bat an eye. I'm here as a guide through some of these. The way I see it, if I can share as many as I can, you can see them coming a mile away and code around them.

Don't. You read "hacker" and your mind quickly links this term to "crime", what a shame. In its origins the term hacker referred to something very different to online crime, it was about restoring balance and building a better World.

In "The Hacker Ethic" Himanen, a Finnish philosopher, picks-up the concept, remind us its true, inspiring meaning and then expands it and presents it as a perfectly valid option to our current status-quo.

More in Wikipedia:

In The Hacker Ethic, Himanen is trying to understand the core of informationalism, the post-industrialist paradigm, extending the ideas of Manuel Castells' Information Age. As an alternative to the industrial-capitalist protestant work ethic he proposes a hacker ethic as something like a cyber communitarianism. The structure of the information society is a web, which in contemporary business world manifests itself, for instance, in dynamic outsourcing and even cooperation with one's competitors. The "knots" of such a web get activated according to the needs and opportunities.

Find Himanen's book in Amazon

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open-source community. (...)