Stop Trying to be Clever

I’ll keep this short. Please, stop trying to be clever. I’m talking to you, mediocre developer. I realized you think it’s awesome to use a different file extension, like .awesome. It’s not. You’re really not accomplishing anything. If your excuse if that you don’t want people to realize you’re using PHP, have the sense to disable the server signature in apache, because anyone that’s actually trying to hack your machine is going to check that.

Why are you mixing if statement styles? Within the same file?


if( $whatever )
{
if($somethingelse) :
$random = 3;
endif;
$random++;
}

Not clever. At all.

Pick an indentation style and stick with it. Tabs or spaces. One or the other. Not both. Not 2 spaces in the first half and 6 spaces in the last half.

Calling undocumented functions within PHP, such as mysql(). At first, I felt dumb for not knowing what this was, then I realized I have absolutely no obligation to ever know (or use) that function. I’ve combed through years of the PHP manual, and I still haven’t found it. Guess what – it’s not cool, it’s not impressive, and I don’t think you’re awesome. I think you’re a jackass that just risked breaking functionality with every single upgrade of PHP. Thanks for nothing.

/rant