Going to my first SQL Summit and shaking Itzik Ben-Gan's hand. His fundamentals for SQL Server book is what I cut my teeth on. Getting to shake Brent's hand and get a cool sticker.

Going to my first SQL Saturday and getting to talk frankly with Jes Borland, Tim Ford, and Grant Fritchey about doing presentations.

Oh, and finding out that Pragmatic Works has an auditing and notification framework, which makes my life so much easier as a data warehouse admin/developer.

Oh oh oh oh I almost forgot! Discovering BIML at Summit! Seriously, this is already cutting down the development time for our "easy" source to staging ETLs