One of the founding members.
Interests:
- Programming: puredata, perl, C, PHP & more
- Electronics: arduino, ARM & more
- Design: gimp, blender, foss video & more
- Admin: bootstrapping, weird ARM crosscompiles, Proxmox
Disinterests:
- Order, Regularity, Consonance
- Finishing projects
http://www.thingiverse.com/buZztiaan/things
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I believe that the maker and hacker community’s drive for self-improvement is hampered by lack of documentation and the motivation to create it. Out of intellectual property concerns, many engineering institutions insist that their employees or peers keep their documents private or secret. While this is a suitable methodology for sensitive applications such as new products or technologies, I contend that it has spilled over unreasonably into the engineering hobbyist and hardware hacker world. Additionally, it’s been my experience that many makers will actively downplay their projects’ importance to them or their community, judging it to be not worth documenting or showing in public.
That, and let’s face it – alot of us are kind of lazy about writing about everything, myself included. Just ask my course professors how much trouble it is to actually get an up-to-date notebook out of me. But, what I am passionate about (i.e. my own works) I document almost exhaustively. It’s one of my goals to encourage as many makers to document and record their projects in as much detail as possible, such that they can not only refer to it when they need to, but also to make it available for beginners and future makers.
I also am a semi-active supporter of the DIY ethic and “makerdom” – that practical, applicable skills and knowledge do not necessarily come from the top down (academia and corporate industry), but a significant portion of someone’s breadth of knowledge in engineering comes from self-driven learning. Therefore, another motivator for the existence of this site is to inspire more people in my age group and younger (or older, or anyone really) to take up the “industrial arts” as a pasttime. Real experience making, designing, and building is, in my opinion, far more valuable than listening to someone else talk about how a product is made or a machine works.