Meet the maker
It’s a dream of many hobbyists: turning their leisure pursuits into a lucrative business. That’s what happened for MIT alumna Limor Fried ’03, MEng ’05, whose pastime — tinkering with electronics — not only gave rise to a profitable company, but also positioned her as a leader of a technology revolution.Since childhood, Fried has built, tweaked and otherwise modified (or “hacked”) electronic devices, sometimes creating her own unique gadgets. Eventually, at MIT and beyond, she would sell these products — while freely sharing their design plans online — through her startup, Adafruit Industries. Now, following that formula, Adafruit has become a multimillion-dollar company that’s been called a leader in the open-source hardware industry. And Fried, now Adafruit’s CEO, is lauded as a pioneer of the “maker movement,” a rising culture emphasizing do-it-yourself technology that has proved to be a profitable niche.In January, Fried — known by her online pseudonym “Ladyada,”...