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.

In reply to Re: To Perl or Not to Perl! by Popcorn Dave
in thread To Perl or Not to Perl! by Marza

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.