David Alcoba, for many years, considered himself a software engineer who liked to play with electronics in his spare time. While being responsible for designing and building highly secure distributed applications for the industry, he also decided to start gaining more and more knowledge of digital fabrication tools every day. And it was then that he realized he had just discovered a world where all of his different interests could be merged into a single project.

Based on this idea, he helped create Vailets Hacklab in 2014, a local community in Barcelona that aims to hack the current educational system so that kids might be co-creators of their future through technology, instead of being just its consumers.

Following the spirit of this initiative, David decided to cofound Makerkids Barcelona,a small start-up focused on providing professional services for schools and organizations to engage kids with the new maker movement and follow the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) educative principles.

Nowadays, David feels that he is not an engineer anymore but a maker.

Siddharth Bhave is a big data researcher at the Center for Data Science at the University of Washington. With a background in electronics and embedded systems, he is interested in the distributed systems aspect of recent big data technologies such as Hadoop and Spark. Siddharth implements and analyzes various machine learning algorithms on Xeon servers. Characterizing their behavior and studying the scalability of algorithms is something that he picked up during his internship at Intel. During his MS degree in computer science, he worked on developing a piece of middleware to work with real-time sensor data fed to a cluster of Raspberry Pi nodes. He wants to translate his work to scale and expand the concept of Internet of Things.

Cédric Verstraeten holds an MSc in engineering and is primarily active in the C++ community. He works as a software engineer and is a huge open source enthusiast. He spends most of his time on side projects that can automate and simplify people's lives. He's the organizer of the Raspberry Pi Belgium meet-up.