in reply to Life beyond CGI and DBI
Are you happy with that? Does it pay well? But perhaps most importantly, are you proud of what you do? Sounds to me like one of the answers may be no. So maybe you need to find a more adveturous client. Or you need to find a stand-alone app with a windows (or portable, after all this is Perl) GUI.
I am 49 and Perl hacking pays far better than being an engineer, scientist or academic (I have done all three and more besides). But I wish I could get my clients to stay small! If you want to grow, find a client who wants to grow as well. This last few weeks I built a 1500 line Perl/Tk/DBI app for one client, added 5-6,000 lines to a CGI nightmare for another client, and I am planning a re-write of 20K+lines for a stock app and a Web-App which should keep me busy for months on that one project alone. The secret? I found a go-getter client who has a little money to pay for his dreams. He has been using me for 4 years now and his dreams, his projects and his budget just get bigger and more sophisticated!
And, yes, officially the language is known as Perl.