It's indeed useful to get out of your comfort zone from time to time and apply your engineering skills in some new area. Once upon a time I've got interested about what kind of simple sound processing one could do using only command line tools at hand. Knowing nothing about the subject it proved to be a challenge for a total newbie like me, but an exciting one with pretty interesting results. The final knowledge was not only tips and tricks about tooling, but also the story of projects behind those tools, which I would love to share with you.