I tend to go down the line of "re-inventing" as well - the last one I did was to build an email module from scratch (basically my own version of Mail::Sender or similar) using Net::Telnet.

Okay.. so it was a pointless exercise in a way (I could have done it a lot easier using Net::SMTP [which I'm now doing to optimise it and learn a little more about Net::SMTP along the way!) but I fancied learning a bit about Net::Telnet and it was a simple solution as I already had something to compare my finished module to.

It may have been reinventing the wheel for sure, but sometimes it's good to get down to first principals (or close) so that you end up with a good understanding of why something works as well as simply how to do something - I feel that makes a distinction between being a good programmer and being a plain code-monkey.

It's a little pointless doing something just because you copied the code out of some book or blindly using a module without really knowing why it works. I'm not saying everyone should build everything from scratch everytime you sit down to program - there would be no sense in that - but when it comes to learning something new, well, it just makes more sense to actually understand it as opposed to simply learing a modules' method/sub list parrot fashion. (Also makes it easier to fix bugs in the future when you can understand why something is going wrong!).

Just MHO anyhow.... now to wait for the next project inspiration ;-)