undead monkeys and the path to enlightenment.

Being a geek since I can remember, all the conversations around best, or more frequently worst coding practices reach the same conclusion.
“Monkeys should never be allowed to code.”

Most developers, (especially web ones) have a bit weird habits when working under pressure and face the oldest dilema of them all; “nice code” vs “fast code”.
And since “fast nice code” doesn’t really exist in this universe, most of these creatures decide to follow the fast track, making other people’s lives unbearable.

Coding patterns, standards and common sense are all tossed aside, torn apart, stepped over and betrayed – all in the name of deadlines and ready made libraries that no one really knows how to use or has bothered rtfm-ing.

So why the undead? Cause every time one monkey dies (or for some weird phenomenon starts behaving like a gentleman), ten more monkeys appear. It’s like zombies I tell you.

Having stepped over all these things a couple of times myself, I figured it was about time I tried to convert a tiny part of this undead horde™ to something more humane.
Php, Javascript, XHTML and Css pitfalls will be the main dishes of the days to come. (And hopefully ways to help you and me get out of them.)

The start of this blog was a result of the very small number of blog entries and general info around some very useful and common patterns especially in php that could actually save your life. For example localization and hierarchical data structures (like modified preorder traversal trees, aka mptt) are scaring the hell out of people with no apparent reason.
I promice nothing even remotely close to the road to enlightenment, rather some basic guidelines and tips how not to miss the road sign (big yellow flashing arrow maybe?).

So let’s go hunt some monkeys :)

ps. I’m a blogging newbie so please bear with me, (and kindly report) my spelling errors and sentences that don’t actually make sense. :)