"Beginner’s Mind is the key behind the phenomenon of Beginner’s Luck: a person doing something for the first time often does it much better than he does after he’s practiced for a while. Because he tries more approaches, and tries them rapidly, a person in Beginner’s Mind is more likely to succeed at a task than one who thinks he understands how it works." -- Arlo Banshee

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." -- Shunryu Suzuki

Code generation goes hand-in-hand with Patterns. The basic premise is using automation to bypass busy work.

My current job is lead ETL development on a multi-district "Public Education" (K-12)data warehouse. I'm using Perl to extract, generate DDL transformations, Oracle load processes and generate Cognos objects.

Perl is my life-preserver. Some of my sources have, literally, 9-20k tables. I've abstracted, aggregated, profiled, translated, filtered, verified, converted, surrogated and documented, all with Perl code.

ETL is more about operations than is is development. If the code still works, why bother refactoring it? Answer: You have a novice around! See: Principle of Lease Qualified Implementer.

To those truly wanting to follow The Path, allow me to provide another forks in the road. K. Czarnecki, s. Helsen; Feature-based survey of model transformation approaches IBM Systems Jounal Vol 45 No 3, 2006. My mind exploded with ideas from this one!

Code generation and patterns provide something useful and interesting to do at the office. I helps me to keep my "Beginner's Mind"

I've recently signed up for PAUSE so that I can contribute some module code -- probably to SQL::Translater -- specifically for Oracle 9+. Its amazing how dated most Oracle support is within CPAN (Metadata API has been around for years...)

Anyone else out there notice a similarity between Perl Monks and Scientology? Who's hiding all the secrets to make ETL easy? It this job security or religion?

So, while I have not provided any concrete examples that I've grown, hopefully I can help "make the soil richer." Nice post -- looking forward to see what this captures.