One of my more geekly habits is to track up and coming technologies for the web. Ruby on Rails is a relatively new development framework that focuses on allowing rapid prototyping of database-driven web applications. Here is a nice post on how RoR can scale up under heavy load.

Bonus link: a 15 minute video on how to create a weblog system in RoR in considerably less than 15 minutes. Assuming you know RoR inside and out, of course.