Matthew Berggren on making electronics accessible

In our new episode of the Hardware Podcast, David Cranor and I talk with Matthew Berggren, who at the time the interview was conducted last December was senior director of product at Supplyframe. (Berggren is now director of Autodesk Circuits at Autodesk.)

Our discussion focuses on the need for abstracted modules and better metadata in electronics. Berggren gets to the root of it here:

There are 30 software developers for every hardware engineer in the world. That’s not only a tremendous bottleneck, but if you accept the premise that the next generation of products are going to be some hybrid of hardware and software—and really, hardware is the means to interact with the real world, and I want to write software applications that will interact with the real world—then there is this massive blue ocean out there that should present tremendous opportunity to semiconductor manufacturers, or anyone else who wants to get into that space.

This week’s clickspirals:

• Matthew Berggren: The “simulation argument”—the question of whether we live in a simulated world, as discussed on the “Philosophy Bites” podcast
• David Cranor: The keyboards on the Lisp machines of the 1980s
• Jon Bruner: Standards for wiring thermostats, which led to ElectroBOOM.