Technichal leadership through open source frameworks, better design, and smarter programming.
The view from here
What makes the Internet progress at a fantastic rate is open source and APIs. While internet software and surrounding communities have lended themselves quite naturally to the practice, open source thinking has further been adopted by many consumer products. Even beer has gone open source. APIs allow applications which may be written in a different language to communicate and exchange data. This ability allows a user to choose which applications they use independently of data and publishing service providers.
The collaborative nature of the internet has brought to life a flourishing ecosystem of knowledge, methods, ideas, and more lines of code than one may care to count. As are result there is certainly no shortage of ways to tell Apache to store, change, and move data. While any two programmers might never agree on which design pattern or language is more efficient, the solution doesn't matter, the idea and the impementation does.
Tools
I have opted to embrace the MVC design pattern however, I code in both PHP and Ruby (on rails). The majority of my work is within PHP applications yet Ruby on Rails has gained some share recently. I deploy my applications on Linux and Apache.
I also develop heavily on the client side creating custom drag and drop, menus and animation. I have a core javascript library called Elementary which assists in advanced cross-browser DOM scripting. I plan to release as much of this code as proper documentation time allows.