Programming is fun, at least to me programming is fun. It's a series of puzzles inside of puzzles, weaved together into a tapestry of function. Or something like that. It's the thrill of each challenge met, each hurdle overcome that keeps me interested in programming. There are however quite a few ubiquitous qualities that web sites and applications with a moderate feature set share. Sessions, db interaction, form processing, you get the picture. I will confess that over the years I am guilty of re-inventing a wheel or two here or there. In retrospect I believe the experience and knowledge gained from doing so was worth the time, or at least the finer tuned re-invented wheel rolled more smoothly or fit more precisely to the circumstances for which it was created. As a software engineer I despise bloat, and detest dependencies, two positions that make designing a usable framework an interesting challenge.