The Chumby with its wiki and open hardware/software philosophy was so ahead of its time and so influential to me. I started my whole career with hacking the Chumby’s user space [1]. The Chumby inspired and took me from an IT worker in a regional public school, to being a professional software engineer, making software shipped to millions of very important machines.
The lesson that I learned from the journey was that working with hardware can be fun and— if you want your career to be long-lasting— better be fun. The Chumby was one of the first devices that showed me that and bunnie was the one who showed me that. I still follow that principle to this day. No day in my life has making firmware or fucking around with hardware devices not something I enjoyed.
My brown leathery boy is still on my desk - although with light leaking from its display, sadly. As its apps slowly start getting out of date, though, I can’t justify keeping it on.
