Engineer, Maker, and innovator Anne Barela was a Senior Foreign Service Officer with the US Department of State. A graduate of both Whitman College and the California Institute of Technology in Electrical Engineering, she has worked at Hewlett-Packard, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Boeing. She has traveled the world, living in a number of countries providing security to American Embassies. An avid electronics enthusiast, she has worked on computers since the introduction of the PC. She rekindled her electronics and microcontroller interests, authoring a number of popular articles on using Arduino-compatible systems. This includes collaboration with Adafruit Industries on their popular Trinket microcontroller.