Obviously, I missed what has gone before, but, reading between the lines, I can guess.
I'd like to say that, in my experience, this has been an enormously friendly forum. At no time has a post of mine been badly treated. I extend kudos especially to Darrel and to Melanie.
I'm 57 (next month) and have been an electronics engineer my entire professional life, and an electronics hobbyist before that since age 12. I've been a licensed ham since 1965 (back when single-sideband had caught on and anything above 50 MHz was pretty much a wasteland).
But it's an enormous field of endeavor, always growing and changing, so there are lots of opportunities for me to still be a "newbie"--and I like that! (I still think op-amps are fun!) Hey, there were still a lot of vacuum tubes out there when I started pushing electrons around! (There's nothing friendlier than the warm glow of a vacuum tube on a dark night.)
A lot of my experience has been in instrumentation and broadcast; I came late to the digital explosion. I learned to program in FORTRAN in the late 1960s, mostly out of self-defense (no such thing as a "computer science" curriculum them). I've done assembly language with the 8008, 4004, 8080, 8085, and the Z80 twenty-plus years ago, and Small C with the 68HC11 a decade back. More recently, it's been BASIC with the MCS51 family. (However, I do still have my trusty UV EPROM eraser. It makes a great paperweight.)
But I'm (a) old and (b) new to PICs. I'm just as capable of asking a dumb question as is the greenest newbie.
I don't mind being told RTFM--but it sure helps if someone says, "Look in section so-and-so". It doesn't hurt my feelings to be reminded, courteously, that Ohm's Law and Kirchoff's Law still work, and that Cole's Law is still thinly-sliced cabbage. Especially helpful is when someone says, "That was covered a while back--see thread such-and-such." When someone posts an elegant snippet of code, I sometimes think, "Duh!--how did I miss that?"
This kind of forum represents an incredible pool of shared knowledge that newcomers can wallow in with sheer delight.
Maybe the only thing you need is a sign that says, "Please don't pee in the pool."
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