Don,

Excellent question -- instead of being able to show them code, I talk enthusiastically (that doesn't need much prompting) about the cool thing that I did -- or one of them -- the challenge involved, my derivation of the solution, some tinkering, and the eventual, gorgeous and complicated solution.

In my case, it was a mod_perl request handler that communicated over a named pipe to a daemon that would spawn off child processes to run a piece of proprietary code to generate page images. After some idle time, the idle children (sound familiar?) would get terminated.

While I couldn't show the code that did all this (for reasons such as you've just described), I was able to talk about how I used IPC::Run to do part of this, and how a watched display of ps axf would show a tree of processes expanding and contracting as the daemon process got busy, then idled off.