Code for America 2012 Fellow and volunteer for One Laptop per Child (most recently in Haiti), formerly an ESRI mapping intern, participant in Knight-Mozilla News Learning Lab, and student at Carnegie Mellon University.
As someone without formal computer science or electrical engineering experience, I benefit a lot from open source projects on the web. Usually I work with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. On the server side, I am a fan of Google App Engine, Python, and MongoDB to set up applications on a shoestring budget. For hardware - you can't beat Arduino.
posted message: Looking for an afternoon Arduino activity? Check out Super Awesome Sylvia's YouTube tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xCY2K9kQz4
posted message: ¿Tienen ustedes interés en leer traducciones de los tutoriales actuales en español? No entiendo mucho pero empecé a escribir en http://openetherpad.org/rmbPZfUcAo
posted message: Two articles for some background on what this is all about: "What is Arduino?" - http://www.pcworld.com/article/239454/geek_101_what_is_arduino.html and "Five Coolest Arduino Projects" - http://yeblon.com/coolest-arduino-projects