Milestone intro

I bought my Milestone back in 2010, and the first thing I did to it was to root it. this involved flashing a vulnerable boot loader onto the phone, and installing the superuser package. That was basically it. I wasn't all that daunted by it, since I've flashed xbox360 DVD drives, and installed CFW on PSPs the whole process was fairly straightforward.
Download the tools,
Boot the phone into its boot loader,
Flash the vulnerable sbf file
reboot, done.
I didn't have to do anything more if I didn't want to. And well, I didn't, for a while.
But then I wanted to customize. I wanted to change my boot animation, I wanted to remove bloatware, I wanted to overclock. Battery be damned.
So I had to find ROMs designed for my phone, with signed UPDATE.ZIP files. At least until I found the exploit that allows unsigned updates to be installed.
I installed Fire and Ice, MIUI, Cyanogenmod, and anything else I could find. I semibricked my phone a few times, having that SBF file at the ready is a lifesaver. I got stuck without GSM while trying to find a way to install a custom baseband file so I could get back on my carrier. I even got trapped in a Chinese loop. But as a whole its been a great experience, and has shown me how to flash other devices. Like my ASUS Transformer, an old Kindle touch, a KOBO reader, and the HTC Desire. Heck Ive even done an iPod.
But my Milestone was my first, and tought me a lot. Most importantly: Backup, and then when your backups fail, get really good at using Google. Cause odds are, if  youve screwed up, someone else has too, and maybe theyre nice enough to save you some time.