Stoyan Stefanov has reposted an article he wrote for the PHP Advent (now Web Advent) site with a tongue-in-cheek look at how to write unmaintainable code in PHP applications.

With the unemployment rates lately being at the levels that they are, everybody realizes that job security is important. And what's the best way to keep a job but to be irreplaceable, one way or another. The simple truth is that if no one can maintain the code you write, you have a job for life. Writing unmaintainable code is a special skill that, strangely enough, seem to come quite naturally to certain developers. But for the rest of you, here are some tips and hints to get you started.

He humorously suggests poor practices in your development such as:

• starting your new job by being vocal about "shifting paradigms" and "enterprise" code
• making it impossible for someone to change one thing without effecting another
• ban coding conventions
• don't write unit tests
• not use templating

...and more. It's a funny piece that has a good message behind it. It's a perfect example of what not to do in development (and what to avoid if you're not doing them currently). The interesting thing is that this was originally published in 2009 and just about all of the points in it are still valid today.