In a new post to his site Tomas Votruba takes the opposite approach to writing good code by sharing bad examples in the form of fourteen tips to write bad code, practices that can make code hard to upgrade and difficult to maintain.

Today I'll show you how to own your company. All you need to do is write code that no-one can read, is hard to refactor and creates technical debt. It's not easy, because if other programmers spot you're writing legacy code, you're busted.

If you keep a low profile of very smart architect and do it right, you'll be the only one in the company who knows what is going on and you'll have a value of gold. Learn how to be successful living vendor lock!

He then goes through his list of poor practices to avoid including:

• Use protected instead of private
• Use Non-String Method Names
• Don't Always use PSR-4
• Hide Your Dependencies in Constructor
• Use Annotations to Define Magic Methods
• Use Traits with Annotations to Define Magic Methods
• Use as Short Naming as Possible

...and many more. For each item in the list sample code is provided so you'll know exactly what to avoid.