> I was never a fan of the Maker Movement. While it did get people to tinker, there was always this massive gap between lighting up an LED and using EEPROM, JTAG debugging, interrupts, and even designing some of the more intricate circuit designs to pull of intermediate projects. I found that there were people who knew how to do that stuff and the rest just trying to get by.
Intense gatekeeping in the electronics community is precisely why communities such as Arduino could flourish in the first place (and their creators could benefit financially). Ultimately, people just want to get stuff done and Arduino is a way of doing it. If you go to Stack Exchange, someone will tell you to buy a college textbook and come back in six months once you understand Laplace transforms. An artist working on an installation doesn't need that. A person building an automated cat feeder doesn't need that. In fact, almost no one does, it's just something we torture EE students with.
I think a lot of the negativity toward Arduino boils down to saying "nooo, it's supposed to be hard!". But if you want the Arduino crowd to get more interested in your field of expertise, you need to build them a ramp, not to tell them they're not real electrical engineers.
You talk about gatekeeping, when most people don't know the difference between git and GitHub, making your first PR is difficult if you have never done it, navigating a repo to look for your first change is difficult. And yet the status quo is that people should just figure that out.
You also talk about gatekeeping when in the many makerspaces I have been to, there are always highly experienced people who tinker on their own terms but rarely pay it forward, meaning they keep their knowledge. The reason for this is due to the often anarchist structure of maker spaces. Things happen if they do.
Sometimes there is an organized class. Most of the times, not. So you come in every week and people are just sitting around talking about the rules of keeping the space clean and when dues are due.
The concept of the hacker space and maker space is great. The execution leaves a lot to be desired. I consider it a 1.0 of a technical movement.
Intense gatekeeping in the electronics community is precisely why communities such as Arduino could flourish in the first place (and their creators could benefit financially). Ultimately, people just want to get stuff done and Arduino is a way of doing it. If you go to Stack Exchange, someone will tell you to buy a college textbook and come back in six months once you understand Laplace transforms. An artist working on an installation doesn't need that. A person building an automated cat feeder doesn't need that. In fact, almost no one does, it's just something we torture EE students with.
I think a lot of the negativity toward Arduino boils down to saying "nooo, it's supposed to be hard!". But if you want the Arduino crowd to get more interested in your field of expertise, you need to build them a ramp, not to tell them they're not real electrical engineers.