I use a variety of tools in my day-to-day work - it's all about finding the right one for the job. Below are the tools I use the most often listed in order of nerd-crush.

Django

High on the nerd-love is Django. I've used it professionally for over a year now, and its power and flexibility have helped in many situations. Most of the nerd-love relates to generic views and the robust templating system (I'm looking at you .NET and Wordpress) - though I can appreciate much of the other nerd-goodness that's baked right in to the tasty Django-cake.

jQuery

Right up there on the nerd-scale with Django is jQuery - full CSS 3 selectors while not having to worry about browser compatibility is a big plus - YES PLEASE! It's speed and the number of plugins available don't hurt either. The biggest nerd-crush goes to the load() method (remote DOM selection!?!?!). You can see my jQuery handiwork on this very site, or over on uncommonsense.com.

Wordpress

Now we see a bit of a drop-off in the nerd-love, but there's still some. Likes:long walks on the beach, staying up to dawn talking ahem, I mean: ease of setup and ubiquity of hosting options. The templating system I'll even give a B. The fact that EVERYTHING is a post or page (which are really close anyway) can be downright frustrating. That and the fact that the admin behavior (check this, don't check this, add this custom field with this value, etc.) can vary so much between sites based on how the templates/themes are set up is a big FAIL.

.NET

.NET gets no nerd-love from me, but I do use it from time to time, and I have melded master pages my needs.

From time to time, I also like to dip my toe into the dark waters of server-land. Though at times it has been frustrating, it is worth the pay off that comes in the form of accomplishment and understanding. For instance: this site is running on a server with the static files served by nginx that has a reverse proxy to mod_wsgi/Apache for the Django application, pretty fancy, eh?