My favorite part of programming has to do with maintaining and using code over the long term. In this sense, reusable APIs and frameworks are central to my work process. Adding a new feature to a project generally does not involve coding something wildly unique or reinventing the wheel. While the various ways in which you interact with web applications vary greatly on the surface, under the hood there should be a level of consistency, in which code is reused, flexible, fast, and straightforward. If you do a lot of form processing, for example, you might maintain a set of commonly used input validation functions. If you’re working with a solid application layer, whether for security, templating, or database functionality, etc., it will evolve over time and become something incredibly powerful, accounting for important trends in the industry which can easily be applied to past projects, as well as accounting for the various server environments in which it needs to run.
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