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Made in Production

Late last summer I was riding my bike around the mountains of New Jersey. I'm not sure if it was exhaustion, the heat or the fact that I had run out of podcasts to listen to but I had an idea: I should get into the t-shirt sale business.

On the ride I kept thinking of potential shirts and quotes. A lot of them got thrown away, and some are chalked to be produced later. The first t-shirt of course had to be something iconic, that PHP developers around the world would understand, love and immediately want.

As PHP developers we are often linked to the Fractal of Bad Design blog post, as though it is somehow relevant to actual PHP developers and not just some big list of bizarre edge-cases and complaints about not being Python. It's annoying, but it has created some amazing imagery for us.

I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.

You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.

You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways.

[ramble ramble]

That’s what’s wrong with PHP.

Double-clawed hammer? That sounds f**king terrifying in the right hands. I figured it would probably look cool too, and Laura did not disappoint:

The general meaning here is that we have a powerful too. It's a bit odd, but in the right hands it can have some serious effects, so make fun at your own risk.

After a few months of occasional hackaton-style code jams with Zack Kitzmiller and some first-rate scribbling from Laura Bee, the first is available for sale!

In the few months since we started this, the mighty double-claws have managed to get around the world. We started international sales a few weeks ago and before that the stowed away with a few Americans, getting as far as Madrid.

This is the first of many t-shirts. We're using profits from the sales of this t-shirt to cover the time it will take to develop and design the site further. We hope this t-shirt can raise enough money to get another designed and maybe get some love for the website design.

Coming next on the development side will be checkouts and the ability to buy multiple shirts.

Please do me a favor and tweet out a link to the website. I want this to be amazing, but we will need help getting the sales up enough to really further it.

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