Years ago, I was a contract programmer at a large university, working on Perl reporting scripts for the library system. Once a month, they reloaded the patron

Years ago, I was a contract programmer at a large university, working on Perl reporting scripts for the library system. Once a month, they reloaded the patron database; it took about 24 hours. If there were a network interruption or power glitch, it would have to be rolled back and run again the next day. Pretty bad. It wasn't my task, but I was curious why this program took so long to run, so I started picking it apart. It was written by a PL/I programmer -- his first Perl project. No comments. He was no longer there. No one understood the script. I started changing things, among other things I moved the Oracle-specific DBD calls out into a separate module, because someone on the internet said Perl ran more efficiently that way. And poof! just like that, the program then ran in 8 minutes, down from 24 hours. I looked like a hero, but I very openly said I wasn't quite sure what I did. Just got curious and moved things around, and apparently discovered some bug in the DBD layer by pure accident. Sometimes curiosity and willingness to experiment is all it takes.