Moving away from Drupal was one of my biggest steps forward as a web developer. I worked with Drupal full time for a little over two years. I spent much of tha

Moving away from Drupal was one of my biggest steps forward as a web developer. I worked with Drupal full time for a little over two years. I spent much of that time clicking around in config screens, and when I did have to get my hands dirty with some custom code, I usually felt like I was just stumbling around in the shadow of the behemoth that is Drupal's API. I thought, "Surely this isn't what web development's supposed to be." Turns out I was right. On recommendation from a developer friend, I started experimenting with a bit Rails, tried a couple of "proper" PHP frameworks, and then discovered Python and its excellent web development ecosystem. That's when it really started to click for me—all these pieces that Drupal had so kindly obscured from me started falling in to place. Rather than trying to push around a monolith, I learned how to keep things lightweight and use only the pieces I needed. And importantly, I was actually writing code. Sweet, readable, maintainable, version-controllable code. None of this "serialize a hugely long options page and dump it all in the DB" stuff. (On a side note, learning git was another big catalyst for my move away from Drupal. D6 always felt like a pain to track in a VCS, especially when I was collaborating with another developer—though the situation may be improving.) I should point out: I think a big part of my frustration was the fact that many of the sites I was building didn't need something as big as Drupal. I've since found WordPress to be a better fit for most of the "easy" stuff, or even static HTML/CSS if it makes sense for the project. When I'm building something more complex, well, there rarely seems to be any reason for me to use Drupal anymore.