Makers at Work

Like Coders-at-Work this is a geek interviewing geeks, and you (mostly) don't get the shiny surface-of-things website-polished ‘about us', but the things you actually want to hear about: the mistakes, the funding problems, the trips to China, the persistent bugs, the first fun hacks, the growing-up stories. All the adventures along the way of hardware-hacking, electronic prototyping and production of objects (sifteo, Arduino, digispark, raspberry pi, makerbot, openROV..) or services (sparkfun, adafruit, OSHpark, Tindie ..). This generation is a bit younger than the Coders-at-Work guys, (and not only guys!) and its therefore easier to relate to (form my perspective).

In general they all seemed to have dads or brothers that were builders, tinkerers, wanna-be inventors. That's how they got infected. Building Tesla-coils or hacking the phone system in their teen years.

A unifying theme that goes throughout the interviews, is the opinion that Intellectual Property protection slows down innovation. As small companies they don't have the resources to patent their inventions. And knowing that China will come and clone their products anyway makes them improve their products at a much faster rate. Similarly the open-source spirit contributes to faster turnarounds as they have large communities collaborating on new solutions. And while this ‘maker' system is just happening in a niche right now, hopefully it might overrun the Apple's and Samsung's and their multi-billion dollars suits one day.