[bigiain]

"What are you looking to do?"

This is the right question.

I'm guessing from reading your question, that you want to build websites without using Drupal/Joomla underneath? (Rather than, say, build mobile apps or robots or hardware?)

Firstly, decide what you want those websites to so - then ask yourself if you _really_ want to build all the bits Drupal/Jooma give you to start with – the answer to that is not often "Yes – I want to implement a CMS from scratch!" (though sometimes it is as a learning tool, if you want to run a website, building on a whole bunch of other people's work - particularly leveraging their past security mistakes - is almost _always_ worthwhile.)

If you can articulate clearly what you want the website to do - it'll be much easier for people to recommend "a good stack" for that task. If your website idea is for a web interface to MatLab, the answers will be quite different than if your idea requires a Hadoop cluster running on a petabyte of data.