I started not directly with CGI but with the problem to make a bilingual (German and English) website (a preprintserver and information about a research group) and to keep the information on both versions consistent. After some selfmade formats we ended up with XML (and XSLT as page generation language (all pages are static, since they change only once a week) so for that no perl was needed).

A while later, we needed a searchfunction for the preprints, which I wrote in perl, so that was the CGI-part. Now I have some additional scripts, one which generates a part of the announcement email (only a part, because there is always some personal stuff in it), and the last thing a perlscript to make a list of the abstracts of the preprints, with an index by author, which is in LaTeX.

And at home i wrote a small program together with my sister (her first programming experience in 10 years!) that helps her to cut sequences of letters (usually DNA-sequences), it is very primitive and cuts at the begin and the end.