When I look back early in my career, I can remember writing an ETL process before I even knew it was a thing. I was an Administrative Assistant in the Pharmacy department of a healthcare company, and wrote a process using Access to import data from a vendor file. It had reports within the database, but also exported the data in both Excel and Word automatically for the monthly executive reporting. To be able to make my job and others easier using technology was thrilling.
Many years later, I ended up re-writing a cursor which took 45-50 minutes, into a set-based query that ran in approx 5 minutes. It was a step in our data warehouse ETL process. At the time, I was working alone, so no-one really understood the joy I was experiencing. It is still something I still reflect on and can literally feel that "kid in a candy shop" type of elation.
Another task I had, which made me feel like a "real DBA", was a dynamic list of databases that were being log shipped from a vendor. With the ability to add databases and keep applying logs even after failures all in a quick fashion made me very proud of what I had built. After I left the company, I even had another DBA tell me it was a great solution, which just helped validate my feelings.
Yet another proud moment was when I got to work with Microsoft on a project plan for bringing our approx 3 TB database on premises in a near real-time fashion. At the time, it was being log shipped, with a once nightly update process which took about 6 hours to run. Preparing the plan and utilizing a new version of SQL which allowed Availability Groups across different domains was so much fun and allowed me to talk about newer functionality.
Lastly, the first time I spoke at a SQL Saturday was awesome! I love giving back to others, and that experience gave me such a sugar high that engaged me for months. I had given speeches before, but it was much better giving a presentation on a topic that I was so excited about. There are times when life creeps up and I am not able to speak for a year or so, but I always come back to it.
All of this reminds me that I truly love what I do and look forward to the next challenge! :)