GPL Driven Development
Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about how it is that a .NET and C++ trained developer like myself came to be in the world of open source and WordPress of all things. And along with that I’ve been encouraging/educating some people to learn how to code in PHP and WordPress. So they usually ask me for books and/or tutorials, but I never really had that when I started with PHP. I simply dived right into the code and, with much praying, hoped I didn’t screw up!
Typically in the WordPress and PHP community a lot of guys tend to moan and groan about the GPL and how it’s screwing things up for the commercial angles, well I’m not going to comment on that as I think most of those people are just making it worse, but what I will say is that it’s helped me a tremendous amount in terms of learning PHP and WordPress.
When I started developing in PHP almost 5 years ago I had no-one locally that I could ask for help as all my mates were .NET developers, and coming from that closed source environment (at that time) I was very hesitant to learn another language. But what I found surprised me – I found a community willing to share and help me. The GPL and open source, in general terms and in the spirit it tries to encourage, allowed me to dig deep into already existing code and learn from others who went before me and wrote some pretty kickass code! And the best part is now that I work for a company who uses the GPL – WooThemes – our users can improve their skills by simply looking at code that I’ve helped write.
And that’s pretty cool in my opinion and why I’m likely not to go back to closed source platforms 
What do you think and how did you learn to code?
Disclaimer: This is my personal view and does not necessarily reflect the views of WooThemes and/or any of their employees.
so last night I decided enough was enough, so here it is – the new Jeffikus.com 
