I have a co-worker who was in charge of the build system at WordPerfect back in the early 90's. He worked on the the UNIX edition and he managed the whole workflow using a series of Makefiles linked across various shared drives.

I'm pretty good at shell scripts but this guy is a master at his craft. Give him any problem and within a few minute he's got a series of piped statements through awk and a few other well-known tools.