I think it's going to come down to two things for you.

1. Do you feel confident enough in your own abilities to write something that is going to be perhaps mission critical?

2. Do you want to have the responsibility of maintainance on the program you wrote? And given Tilly's problems you might not even be able to share your resulting work, but that may or may not be a problem for you.

By writing something like that for your place of employment you may be putting yourself in a position that later on down the road you wish you hadn't.

I had a friend who worked at Tandem Computers about 15 years ago picking parts. One of his duties was to do a random inventory of parts. Some of the parts needed to be counted daily, some weekly, some monthly, and some every 6 months. So he did what any normal programmer would do - he whipped up a program in Turbo Pascal to generate random numbers and make an inventory counting schedule based on that. When he switched departments, he got a phone call a while later asking him to update the program. He told them to get stuffed as it was his, and he wasn't going to do it.

Somehow I don't think it's as possible to get away with this in today's climate, but it is something to consider before you put the effort in for the company.

That said, if you wanted to do it yourself to see if you could do it FOR yourself, then hell yes, go for it!

Good luck!

There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling now.