Tindie head of engineering Julia Grace stopped by Hackbright Academy to introduce software engineers to the world of hardware. She gave a tech talk on “Robots, JavaScript and Drones: Welcome to the Hardware Revolution!” Julia discusses how she started hacking hardware, trends in this nascent market, and how you can start hardware hacking, without even touching C++.
Watch the video from her tech talk at Hackbright here:
Julia Grace is the Head of Engineering at Tindie, where she built the engineering team and still writes Python (and the occasional JavaScript) every day. In her prior lives she was CTO of a 500 Startups company, Product Manager at a mid-stage startup, and Research Engineer at part of one of the world’s top User Experience Research groups at IBM Almaden Research. She hold a BS and MS in Computer Science with a focus on distributed systems. She spends her “free time” half-marathon running, hacking on her collection/army of Arduinos and sits on the board of the Computer History Museum.
The New York Times proclaimed last August the “hardware renaissance in Silicon Valley.” Sixteen months later, Amazon announced “delivery by drone” in the not-too-distant future, publicity stunt or not. As the barriers both in cost and access to hardware have come down, you don’t have to be an electrical engineer to build some sweet circuits.
We see kids to artists to web developers build on top of Arduino and Raspberry Pi, making everything from intricate light-up clothing to home automation systems. So what does all this mean for the future of hardware? And how will it impact all us software people?
She will answer your questions, discussing her experiences as a “Software Person in a Hardware World”, running the engineering team at Tindie (“Etsy for Indy Hardware Makers”).