If writing awesome code is using all the best practices I can find, writing interfaces, unit tests and using top notch IoC containers to control my repositories and services all over my application's different layers - Then I'm not writing awesome code at all! I've been that guy, the one writing the awesome code, but I stopped. I'm not awesome any more. Instead, I'm productive, I'm so damn productive!

He talks about how not writing unit tests (which "customers don't care about") gave him extra time to work on other code and how not using things like interfaces, ORMs and how he follows DRY, but only so far.

My personal result of doing all of this is productivity and better products. I can't tell if I did it all wrong, and that's why I'm writing better code now, but I truly believe that I'm not alone. In fact I think that most of us regular web developers, tend to do the same "mistakes" as I did.

The post has turned into flame bait and has pulled in lots of comments discussing his decisions and other sympathetic souls that feel the same way he does about some of the complexity of the "best practices" promoted in development today.

The idea is that most of your controllers share something in common with each other. For example: All admin controllers need to make sure a logged in user is present and that they are an administrator. A public controller may want to load a theme for your application and load default user data, navigation links or anything else frontend related.

The problem is solved by creating a base controller - in his example its one called MY_Controller that follows the CodeIgniter naming convention and allows you to easily make other controllers that extend it. You'll also need to make a small addition to your config.php file to get the base controllers working correctly and make them able to be found.