Maker Pro is a book of essays by more than a dozen prominent and up-and-coming professional makers (Maker Pros). Each essay includes advice and stories on topics such as starting a kit-making business, taking a hardware project open-source, and plenty of encouragement to "quit your day job." This book is a reference for anyone who dreams of turning a hobby into a small business, and features stories from well-known professional makers; it will turn aspiration into inspiration.
John Baichtal is a contributor to MAKE magazine and Wired's GeekDad blog. He is the co-author of The Cult of Lego and author of Hack This: 24 Incredible Hackerspace Projects from the DIY Movement.
Wendy Jehanara Tremayne is interested in creating a decommodified life. She was a creative director in a marketing firm in New York City before moving to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where she built an off-the-grid homestead with her partner, Mikey Sklar. She is founder of the nonprofit, textile repurposing event Swap-O-Rama-Rama, which is celebrated in over 100 cities around the world, a conceptual artist, event producer, yogi, gardener, ultra runner, backpacker, and writer. She has written for Craft's webzine, Make: , and Sufi magazines and, with Mikey Sklar, keeps the blog Holy Scrap. She is author of The Good Life Lab: Radical Experiments in Hands-On Living (Storey), a memoir and tutorials. Publisher's Weekly named it best summer read for 2013 and the book was awarded the 2014 Nautilus Book Silver Award for Green Living/Sustainability.
Andrew "bunnie" Huang is an open source hardware designer, Xbox hacker, and creator of the Chumby. He lives in Singapore. In 2012, he received an EFF Pioneer Award for his work in hardware hacking, as well as his advocacy of the open source philosophy.
Sophi Kravitz has been creating interactive works since the completion of her first animatronic project in 2004. Sophi is a formally trained engineer whose first career was in Special FX makeup for film and theater. It was then, while creating works that were seen on small screens or large, that she realized the great fun in creating works that can easily satisfy an audience or group of participants. Although her art-engineering pieces have a technical aspect, such as electronics or code, participants interact with them as simple and beautiful playthings. Photo credit: Sophi Kravitz.
Though most known for inventing the wildly popular TV-B-Gone, a keychain that makes it fun to turn off TVs in public places, Mitch Altman is an inventor with a reputation for creating intriguing devices that amaze and delight, such as the Brain Machine, Trippy RGB Waves, and the Mignonette Game. Mitch co-founded 3ware (a Silicon Valley RAID controller company), and co-founded Noisebridge (a San Francisco hacker space). Mitch has written for MAKE Magazine and 2600 Journal, and for the last few years has traveled the world teaching people to solder and how to make cool things with microcontrollers. He is currently writing a book to teach total beginners how to make cool things with microcontrollers.
