The beginning is fun -- I'm faced with a problem or a challenge, I turn a couple of solutions around in my head, drink coffee, try a few pieces of sample code and eventually watch it morph into a solution.

One of my favourites was a mod_perl requester that talked through a pipe to a daemon, making requests. The daemon would spawn an instance of a Big Honking Application for a particular document, get it to do something, pass the result back through the pipe, and keep the child process around for 60 seconds in case another request for the same document came through. Doing a watch on the process tree while the thing was being used was totally awesome, and very satisfying.

Yes, it was all Perl.