Agreed, you want to do it the hard way first to get real insight into the problem. By the time you get around to actually automating it you'll be ready to. Am

Agreed, you want to do it the hard way first to get real insight into the problem. By the time you get around to actually automating it you'll be ready to. Am fortunate in my present position that the projects I get tend to be complex one-off types. I have a lot of leeway on how it gets done as long as the software engineering aspects are sound. I've had the opposite frustration at times in the past, where people around me were content to do it the tedious manual way forever. As a typical Perl programmer type that was kind of painful :-).