I learned how to mill a PCB at this week's shop training. It's actually pretty simple and nice for the most part the machine guides you through the process.
This week's assignment was pretty straightforward, and I was glad to not have to overthink this one. I made the D11C-echo-10 board (this version at Anthony's suggestion) which already existed on the computer connected to the milling machine. I'm not going to lie, this machine is pretty cool and fun to use in my eyes (later note: I now have too many videos of milling PCBs just because).
I was very lucky to have soldered before; I am amazed at people who first learned to solder in HTMAA, because boy is it much harder than soldering regular-sized components! It was also good to have Anthony show me a few soldering tips that I would probably not have thought of, such as putting down solder on the pad and component separately before soldering the component actually on in order to let the component "stick" first (this is particularly helpful given the proclivity of the tiny capacitors and resistors to freely move while trying to insert new solder).
There was one thing that was a bit odd about programming this new board, however. After burning the EDBG bootloader onto the microcontroller, I tried to program another board using my new programming board. Unfortunately, when I tried to upload my code to the board to allow it to program another board, it didn't work. I got a weird error. I got somewhat worried about having perhaps shorted something or broken something after uploading the bootloader, but Anthony then tried to program it with his computer, and it worked fine, so it must have been something with my computer.