[jerrysievert]

my favorite (plv8, but relevant) was working at an esri r&d center, and having corporate remind us that we needed to include esri's json format in our product offering in addition to geojson (our supported format).

I was away at a conference (jsconf, amusingly), and simply added the arcgis to geojson converter that was already written in javascript as part of another open source project we had released, and voila, we could suddenly support it in the database. one of the product engineers quickly added an additional database call to the backend, and we were all set.

simple problems, simple solutions, especially when dealing with json conversion.