Bryan DeLuca: Seeing that the largest demographic is males 48+ in electronic Engineering, what challenges are there for the younger age group? What challenges are there for women?
Limor Fried: There are guy engineers? All the best engineers I know are women and under 40 – but these are my friends and peers, so I’m biased. Kidding aside, I do know a few good male engineers. 🙂 The biggest challenge for any group is to see others like them doing engineering. We need to celebrate engineers and expose kids at earlier ages to how much fun engineering is. The more kids see themselves doing engineering, the more likely we’ll see them choose this creative field.
Bryan DeLuca: What advice do you have for young engineers?
Limor Fried: Publish, publish, publish. Any time you make something, document it and publish online. It can be on Instructables, MAKE, our forums, Flickr, a blog, wherever, but publish fast and publish often. When we look to hire people or work with them, we usually look for what they’ve shared online. Since we do open-source hardware, good documentation and willingness to share is extremely important to us.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
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Limor Fried: Open-source hardware watch. Working on it 🙂
Oooooh! If you make this into a kit or something, I’ll be all over that! I accidentally bought an InPulse before I realized how dreadfully closed they are. I have no doubt Adafruit would do it better & do it right.
Oooooh! If you make this into a kit or something, I’ll be all over that! I accidentally bought an InPulse before I realized how dreadfully closed they are. I have no doubt Adafruit would do it better & do it right.