The first example in the article, a regex engine, clicked for me. I had read the book on beautiful code #, and the first short story was about a regex thing by none other than Dennis Ritchie. As Fate would have it, my job required me to make a tool for web scraping. Inspired by that book I created a pattern matching language for dom trees. And a click and point tool to create those patterns. At the best time or company had a full time person maintaining maybe 10k patterns to scrape days from library catalogs... It was not a toy project, but it did feel like, even if I got paid to do it.

# Andy Oran, Greg Wilson: "Beautiful code"