July was a month of talks and travel, including speaking at OSCON and user group talks to DCPHP and PDXPHP.

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This past week saw a huge dust-up over the issue of whether or not WordPress themes are GPL. It’s not my goal to rehash the debate, or even to discuss it in particular; instead, my goal is to share some thoughts I’ve had about software licensing, and in particular, licensing going forward as a result of the WordPress theme dispute.

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I, along with others, have written on interfaces many times before but recently I had occasion to find a new thing about them that makes them really awesome. A few days ago I was tasked with implementing PHPUnit against a Zend Framework application. This application, like many others, makes use of Zend_Auth, and in doing so makes use of the Zend_Auth_Storage_Session class. The problem with unit testing is that sessions aren’t supported very well, and I ran into all kinds of challenges when I tried to use the existing functionality.

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In November of 2009, I wrote about why developers should write their own frameworks. I pointed out at the time that often developing a framework forces developers to make the kinds of architectural choices that frameworks require, which helps them better understand the architectural choices in the most popular frameworks.

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Last week, I began working on something that didn’t pan out. For whatever reason, I went down the wrong path, and ultimately abandoned the task I was working on. In discussing it with my boss, he mentioned to me that it was better to realize early on that something wouldn’t work than to trudge onward, insisting that it be finished due to the “sunk cost” of the time already spent.

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