O’Reilly’s day job is heading O’Reilly Media, created in 1978, which began as a purveyor of distinctively friendly computer manuals and later stretched to include conferences, epublishing, and a spin-off venture capital firm. (It has done seed rounds with the likes of Foursquare, Bitly, and Chumby.) But the 58-year-old CEO is better known as a free-range proselytizer of the tech revolution. His ability to quickly identify nascent trends is unparalleled. It was O’Reilly who first figured out that programming was becoming a mass skill. O’Reilly who realized in 1993 that the Internet browser would broadly transform civilization, spurring him to form what was arguably the first web portal, the Global Network Navigator. O’Reilly who recognized that open source would be a liberating engine of innovation and so created books and conferences around that theme. O’Reilly who saw the rebirth of the web as a participatory medium and launched the influential Web 2.0 conference dedicated to promoting and plumbing that notion. O’Reilly who identified hackers as canaries in the coal mine of emerging technology, and O’Reilly who made a point of tapping the minds of such people—allowing his company to grasp and share the import of advances like Wi-Fi, big data, and the maker movement earlier than almost anyone else.
“Create more value than you capture.”
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
