In a similar vein, but on a much smaller scale - I impressed my father who is maintaining a web site recently when they were moving the site to a different server provider. The basic tool that the new provider provided for uploading files to the site required that the files be loaded one at a time through a web page. They suggested an ftp application to do the job of uploading about 2000 files, but the application was slow and only managed to transfer about 1 in 3 of the files (due to timeouts!).

I wipped up a simple Net::FTP/Tk app in about 3 hours to do the job and saved the day. Plenty of brownie points for that effort!