I will go with my first post on the forum: May 08, 2009. (Oh, fond memories of the old forum. The confusing organization. The incredible amount of spam. The chaos of essentially no moderation.)
Wow. I have 2907 "dead" posts. I wonder where those have gone.
Of the people with more posts it looks like @AWOL and @Grumpy_Mike are the only two who have been here longer (the two who have contributed more over a longer time).
wilykat:
And how many have you accidentally damaged or destroyed?
Two ATmega328P processors.
I was trying to read analog signal but no matter what it always returned a value between 400 and 450.
Yup. Fried analog-to-digital converter. Short-circuit through AREF.
In a previous life I had developed a few embedded systems. The work was fun. After being away from that kind of work for a while I thought it would make a good hobby. The first step back was a BASIC Stamp. That lasted about a month. I started playing with Arduino because programming that BASIC Stamp was so very awful.