I'm a sometime PIC hobbyist and refugee from the Microchip marketing adventure game (or perhaps evil experiment?) being conducted at http://www.microchip.com/forums/.
I started my PIC journey in 2009 with a Sure Electronics PIC18F4520 Dem2PLUS/Low Pin Count Board and a Dangerous Prototypes dsPIC33FJ128GP204 web platform (http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Web_Platform). Since then, I've assembled a number of PCBs from through hole to pure SMD using various PICs. Nothing of any great moment was ever accomplished; it's more a purely educational pursuit for its own sake somewhat reminiscent of programming a 6502 in machine code back in the early 80s.
I've programmed the Commodore VIC-20 (6502 machine code, assembler, BASIC), PC-DOS (assembler, Zortech C), Windows (Delphi), OS X (C, Lazarus and Free Pascal), FreeBSD (C, Lazarus and Free Pascal, Bourne shell scripts), Solaris (C, Bourne shell scripts) and PICs (Microchip C compilers, MikroElektronika C and Pascal compilers, JALv2 compiler).
In a former life, I was a lawyer who worked for a legal publishing company for 20 years in various roles ranging from author to IT consultant. Until this month, I'd spent 13 years working for a charity as a developer automating the acquisition, conversion and provision of Australian law online for free access.
I'm now gainfully retired