Been using apache for my entire life - until I saw a blog entry about nginx. The static speed gains by themselves had me hooked, and the fact that I could just pass everything off to an FCGI instance meant that really the only thing slowing my development down was my own code. Nginx/Cherokee + FCGI = Awesome.
Now, to get multiple FCGI processes running off 1 nginx instance XD. Ultimate developmental server? For me anyway.
A new developer.