It’s T-SQL Tuesday again, and I’m writing in response to Shane O’Neil’s invitation about cookies. Read what he asks and this will make more sense.

As always, if you want to participate, write a post on your blog and follow the rules on the invite.

If you want to host, ping me on Twitter.

My Cookie

I’ve had quite a bit of success in my career. I’ve worked hard, and I was lucky to be born intelligent enough to get things done in this field, but I’ve had a lot of help along the way. I don’t want to discount the things others have done for me, whether that’s a favor, an opportunity, or a lesson. This post is about standing on shoulders, my own and others, in a way that still makes me smile today.

I had a lot of experience programming in the past. I’m not great at it, but I’m effective. A few years ago someone asked about getting a list of the PASS sessions from the DVD that they’d purchase in a data set. They didn’t want to go through the HTML index on the drive, but wanted a better data set to work with the sessions.

At the time, I had the USB key sitting on my desk. I was doing some R learning at the time and decided to see if I could do something in R. I remembered a few years earlier when Aaron Nelson had helped me with a PowerShell script to download some videos, and I wanted to see if I could do something in R.

I ended up building a short script that read in the data, cleaned it up, and exported a short R script that contained the session titles, authors, and the MP4 file. It took my only tens of minutes, and I was quite proud of it.

Actually, I need to blog that script.

In any case, when I sometimes face a task that is unfamiliar, I remember how I worked through the process and got things working. When I worry about a new technology, I remember how I accomplished this in R, which was new to me.

It’s a delicious cookie, even today.