Engineer, Maker, and innovator Mike Barela is 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, he has worked at Hewlett-Packard, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Boeing. He has traveled the world, living in a number of countries providing security to American Embassies. An avid electronics enthusiast, he has worked on computers since the introduction of the PC. He rekindled his 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.