Happy Labor Day to everyone. It's a holiday in the US, so a break from labor for many of us, but those of you outside the US are probably hard at work, so I hope you have a very productive, stress-free day.

Labor Day was conceived as a workingman's holiday, and should celebrate the efforts of workers at their crafts. It was an attempt to heal relations between railroad workers and companies in the wake of the Pullman Strike, but it has also come to mark the end of summer and beginning of school for many in the US, though many educational institutions have already started the new year in August.

With that in mind, I'd like you to stop and think for a minute about the things you build or work on. Think of something that you are proud of having worked on. I hope that you have a few fond memories of work that has gone well in your career.

I've built lots of software, and there are quite a few systems I'm proud of. I worked to rewrite an inventory application for an import business, a data center management application for one large company, and even a few reports that I thought were very useful and valuable to my employers. I didn't build most of the software running this site, but I do think that SQLServerCentral as a total entity is the thing I'm most proud of. I'm not sure if my fellow founders, Andy Warren and Brian Knight, feel the same way, but I'm quite pleased that I've been able to help many SQL Server professionals get better at their jobs.