My first introduction to microprocessors was back in 1976 with a cpu by national semiconductor sc/mp (pmos at first) programmed with a bank of toggle switches and all of 128 bytes of ram. I was about twelve at the time and I quickly understood binary and hexadecimal numbering but it took me a while to comprehend the concept of machine code. I had no one to teach me other than some magazine articles with some sample code to do binary counts on the leds and the datasheet for the device. Then one day it dawned on me. Almost overnight I was hand assembling code. I could probably recite most of the instructions today! Then it was onto TRS80s then I worked designing add-on boards for a hitachi 6809 based computer then playing around with PCs. The strange thing is all my friends used to ask me about their computer problems - now I ask them! I'm a computer user these days. Then my first 'professional' job was designing lighting control systems which was fun at the time then to fixing and designing instrumentation for hazardous areas. So, I've been an embedded systems guy from day one. Software for some time was never my strong point until I really did a lot of reading about how to write software - there's been a lot of research on this topic over the last 30 years. So I'm always one to pipe up about these issues. I've been lucky to have a couple og mentors that helped me a lot when I was younger giving me a grounding in the basics of digital design and cpu architecture. I'm always on the lookout for new (or old) techniques for solving the problems we always come up against in embedded systems. Whilst the internet is a wonderful thing for sharing information - it can make finding information too easy - so easy to suffer from information overload. But nothing can surpass gettting your feet wet and doing it yourself. Learning from you mistakes makes you an 'expert' by default as you know what simply doesn't work!