Software Developer, Media Nut, and Proud Father of Two

I consider myself to be a competent PHP, CSS, HTML, and JS developer as well as a perfectionist. To quote Adrian Monk: It's gift.... and a curse. This perfectionist gift/curse has helped and hindered me in the several years that I have coded in the mentioned languages. The gifts has brought about great results in the work that I have performed in the past that has made my clients happy with those results. The curse, however, has slowed down progress. Within the last year, I have started making a new framework or CMS at least three times and there is no end in sight for a number of reasons.

My feelings are split on what direction I should take my coding expertise. I have the potential to be a great developer, and until I make that breakthrough, I continue doing the same ol same ol: start with enthusiasm, hit a few bumps, neglect the project for a few days or weeks, and the next thing you know I'm starting on a new, fresh idea for my project or am ready to scrap on the existing project. I'm a DIY kind of person, whether it's programming, carpentry, or in sports, I like to be that person. Because of this, I have resisted the urge of calling it quits on my own personal endeavor and simply adopting a tried and true solution that requires less creative thinking on my part, and more rapid deployment. So my options are:

1. Continue creating my own framework and very slowly get to a point of mass deployment
2. Adopt a framework and build off of that, requiring me to make some critical features (more later)
3. Adopt a CMS and build off of that

A few months ago I adopted the Zend Framework, a complex, yet brilliantly built set of tools that I can depend and rely on in creating my sites. The benefits in adopting a framework is that it gives you tools in accomplishing a number of tasks, some more troublesome than others. For instance, with the Zend Framework I am capable of creating multiple database connections to varying database systems (useful for web applications), have a handy set of tools for date and time manipulation (which can be a pain when you introduce timezones), several APIs to services offered by Flickr, Amazon, Delicious and Yahoo, among others, and useful form validation tools (if you know me, you know I trust user input about as far as I can throw a car). This isn't even the tip of the ice burg to the features a developer like myself can benefit from when using the Zend Framework. The problem, at least for me, comes in with the critical features I mentioned earlier: an event based calendar system, a functional blog, a bot protected contact page, or a login system for user authentication that allows and restricts users to certain areas. The good and bad thing about these "problems" is that these kind of tools are not included, and they shouldn't be; including them would make it more of a CMS than a framework. So then what? Well, there's option three: adopting a CMS. Enter Drupal.

I have begun the initial steps in being a Drupal developer. A potential downside to this move is that I will be unable to use Drupal for the web application that I currently maintain with my current employer. The great thing about this is that I have a tried and tested system that has many tools already made that I can utilize in my websites, but I still have a learning curve ahead of me in regards to developing on Drupal, but I'm a competent developer, so I can adapt. And away we go...