The Maker Movement has Arrived

“There is a unique, underground venture capital economy happening right now in America that is, in many ways, off the radar screens of economists. When we tally up the economic indicators, the conventional wisdom seems to be that economic growth in this country has stalled. Yet, that same conventional wisdom ignores the economic activity on DIY sites like Kickstarter.”

-Dominic Basulto, The Washington Post

Discovering the World of Makers, this past year, has profoundly changed the way I think, the things that keep me occupied day-to-day, what I read about, what I talk about, and even my attitude towards my day job.

6 years of education in Electrical Engineering and 5 years of work experience with complex Hardware projects didn’t seem sufficient to think of myself as an ‘Engineer’. My skills and knowledge were largely limited to the problem domain we were addressing at work. But in a funny way, as an amateur Maker, the petty-little projects which I was working on at nights and on weekends made me feel like I was living up to my profession as an Engineer.

I think this is primarily because of what the Maker-Lifestyle does to your thought process and the kind of things you start wondering about. You develop this unquenchable thirst to find out how everything around you works. What makes the Maker Movement truly extraordinary is that, this thirst manifests in different forms for different people, and that is what makes this community so diverse and eternally interesting. You have the Roboticists and Hexacopterists. The Hard-Hats making elaborate wood and metal work integrated with electronics. You have the Bio-People big into DIY-Biology – and for me, this thirst has manifested in a want to learn and experiment with Guitar and Synth effects, the web stack, aesthetics, typography and graphic design. With the wealth of information being shared these days, learning anything new seems just an arm’s length away – you just have to reach out and grab it.

First Circuit: Adding remote control volume inc/dec or mute/unmute functions between an audio source and speakers – My first time with Arduino, RasPi, AVR microcontrollers, EagleCAD

This rich, engaging and ever expanding Maker-Universe has left me with this extremely satisfying feeling that the rest of my life is going to be Hella-Exciting.

First Website: Twitter Bootstrap with a WrapBootstrap Theme, hosted on AWS S3 – My first time with HTML, CSS, JS, AWS

Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, has nicely summarized the awesomeness of this Movement in his book

“This book is built on my experience at the front lines, and although I’ve endeavored to use journalistic standards of reporting, research, and fact-checking, I don’t pretend to be impartial. This is a future I believe in, and I’m one of many working to build it.”

-Chris Anderson, Author. Maker. Entrepreneur.

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