Software Thoughts
I've been building websites since '96 or so, and it's been interesting to see the web change. These days I use a lot of Ruby on Rails - it just makes development fast. Ruby's speed isn't a bottleneck so I enjoy using it a lot.
Page speed is a huge deal for me. Privacy is too. Most of the web sucks these days with megabytes of frameworks and ads and tracking nonsense. It's a rare treat to stumble upon a (usually old) site that's largely text-based without a bunch of the aforementioned nonsense, and every time I do I'm inspired to make something fast.
I try to build simple, fast, and reliable. I always plan for the maintenance of whatever I'm buying or building, software or physical.
Some Favorite Software Things
git is such a useful tool, I have git repos for everything and love working with its powerful tools like rebase, bisect, and various merge strategies.
Ruby on Rails is solid, has great support, and working in ruby is nice. For me, rails is the way to building and iterating on apps quickly. Some people will argue that it's slow, but most of the slowness in most apps is bad front-ends or slow queries and databases that need indexing and optimization, not the few extra milliseconds of the rails stack. At the scale of things I'm doing, it's always been fine.
vim is my text editor, and it's pure joy to use. Available on most systems, lightning fast, and almost like a video game in that there's always new tricks to learn and things to master. I often run multiple vim sessions in GNU screen.
Anything running on a raspberry pi is usually fun. I use pis for all sorts of random projects around the house.