So if you have a job in software, you've probably dealt with this scenario before. Your company goes through a round of layoffs to better match expenses with revenue. A valid and sometimes necessary business decision. BUT, if you rewind the clock back to when all the decision makers were making their optimistic predictions about how much money the company was going to make,  they were guessing, perhaps using some data points, some analysis and research but when it gets down to it they were guessing.

I thought this was kind of neat. An http proxy is a useful tool to have, there are many types for many different purposes. It's a program that you can put between a client and a web server. See the wiki article for all the common uses for a proxy. Anyway, after playing with these for a couple of days I had some needs at work that it seemed would work if I had a proxy server I could drop some custom code in for various things.