I once joined a team where I had a secondary responsibility for configuring and generating periodic reports. These were daily or weekly activity reports for the

I once joined a team where I had a secondary responsibility for configuring and generating periodic reports. These were daily or weekly activity reports for the platform I was expanding and supporting. When I joined, each report required custom coding and it took about two weeks to turn around. I got bored of coding these reports. Bit by bit, I built a templating system and a configuration-based way of building these reports. Users were able to get reports not only in CSV files, but also in HTML, plaintext, and Excel files. They could get them not only by email, but also via FTP and SFTP. Reports could be customized in a variety of ways. Most importantly, with the new system, I could turn a report around in about five minutes. When I joined there were less than 20 reports in the system. When I left, there were hundreds. Our internal users found these reports valuable, but the emotional cost of requesting and waiting for one was a burden. Removing this burden was a pleasure. No one ever said that this needed to be done. It was an itch that got scratched.