The Medical Staff office where I work purchased an expensive bit of software to help them keep track of the credentials of the physicians who work at the hospital. It's based on an MS-SQL database and works well enough for the people that use it. However, they wanted to tap into the database and make the physician information available to the entire staff of the hospital. When it came time to implement that particular piece of the project they found that it required purchasing many, many more software licenses and having a tech install it on every PC in the establishment--a large and expensive proposition.

While the other analysts were standing around scratching their heads, I dabbled around with some Perl code and SQL programming and built a nice little interface that displays the information on our Intranet. It works well--people use it--and it cost the hospital exactly nothing in actual dollars for software.

It's not so much the code that I'm proud of--it's the ability that Perl has of being able to do much-with-little. And the fact that while I'm considered to be a bit of an odd-duck here, I was able to pull up a solution for a problem that no one else knew how to solve.