When Raspberry Pi came out, I had just started writing for a long defunct Linux magazine at a now dead publisher, and we were immediately enthralled. I spent years writing tutorials using a 256MB Raspberry Pi 1 Model B – turning Raspberry Pi into robots, media centres, file servers, routers, BOINC nodes, and much more. One day, I even managed to break the entire office LAN while playing around with network settings, oops. It was a lot of fun though, and I learned loads doing it.
Late bloomer
I was one of the kids that grew up in the late nineties and early noughties who experienced the loss of proper computing lessons at schools, so to be able to learn to code and learn practical programmable electronics in my twenties was a huge thing for me. It’s one of the reasons I landed on The MagPi in 2015, and more importantly, the reason I have stayed for around 80 issues.
Seeing the passion of the community that first year was electric. When we put out issue 40 with Raspberry Pi Zero on the cover, we thought it might be popular, but we didn’t realise just quite how popular. It took about a week for the constant stream of messages from people wanting to get a copy to die down, and it took years for us to stop getting messages asking if we had any left at all.
Since then, I’ve been through many things with Raspberry Pi. The launch of Raspberry Pi 3, the AIY Vision Kit we did with Google, sending Raspberry Pi to space, new cameras, Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 400, Raspberry Pi Pico, and recently Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, just to name a few.
Now where?
As the second decade of Raspberry Pi looms ahead, my enthusiasm hasn’t died down a bit. I still get new ideas every month for something to do with Raspberry Pi, and I will never cease to be amazed at the creativity of the community and how much they’ve supported us over the years. I’ll be right here with you to see what 2022 brings to Raspberry Pi, and the ever-changing world it’s helping.
