As my first blog post, I'll discuss at a high level three things that I feel are the most powerful tools available to SharePoint admins who have some (client-side) development skills.  The Content Editor Web Part, XML Web Services and JavaScript.  Subsequent posts will describe real-life examples of how this has helped in the SharePoint implementation that I manage.

Content Editor Web Part (CEWP)
The most flexible and powerful web part that comes with every SharePoint implementation is the CEWP.  To give credit where credit is due for this opinion, the person/blog that opened my eyes to the power of the Content Editor Web Part is Todd Bleeker's 12 Hive where there are several examples of how it can be used.  After spending a few minutes reading these posts, I took the next several weeks worth of "free time" and created some very useful web parts without having to compile any code.

XML Web Services
Everyone knows the power of publishing and consuming data via XML over HTTP whether it be XML RPC or full-blown web service.  We also know that significant power lies within the SharePoint web service API.  The problem that I've always had with the SPWSAPI however, was the lack of useful documentation from Microsoft regarding how to actually interact with it.  Being inspired by Todd's CEWP stuff, I subsequently took the time to dig a little deeper into the SharePoint web services and have been able to create some pretty useful stuff.

JavaScript
JavaScript is what makes the CEWP and Web Services useful together.  Posting back with the XMLHTTP object via JavaScript allows you to talk to anything (not just XML) over HTTP, parse it and then present it to the user.

 -Aaron