A senior of mine at my current job has asked me to write a tool to convert from UFF format to csv for easy spreadsheet processing, producing results that proved most beneficial to me (the path towards code mastery). The tool is less than 200 lines of Python code, and I even got a peek at the necessary changes to have it run on Python 3 (and successfully doing so), as well as experiencing the relatively unchallenging problems of getting it to run on Windows XP (it was developed on Debian). Of course I would not have bothered had the requirement not been getting it to run on that most popular of end-user OSes. But Python's cross-platform nature makes it easy, and their work on getting the supporting suite (installer, IDE, Python shell) easy to install and run on Windows deserves serious respect.
By the way I haven't so far learned the importance/use of classes so the entire thing is in functions. And the code is also extremely slow (and even slower on WinXP) and only does basic checks for the validity of the source file to be processed so will loudly crash on corrupted files. Other than that, the tool is pretty robust and made my 'client' real happy, considering the previous tool was really broken by design (a pain to work with, being muddled with severe limitations) and also relied on Matlab being installed.