Hi folks!
I am doing some research, and I really want to her your story when you first discovered Arduino! 
How did you find out about it? How much tech knowledge did you have from before?
Where did the interest comes from? And at last: why did you start using it and is the same reason you keep using it years after?
Would also love to talk to some of you if you are in Boston area and learn more!
Have a beautiful day!
Summer 2010. First noticed Arduino being discussed in instructables. BSEE with 25 years experience in high speed electronics design before that. The IDE made it easy to develop a serial stream monitor to turn on/off LEDs based on data in the message (5 bytes that were continually updated). Having a microcontroller with all support built in meant a single chip solution too, no messing with added SRAM, PROM of some form, etc.
I keep using it now for similar reason - easy to program in the IDE, easy to implement hardware with a uC family that is easy to add peripheral devices to for additional control.
And I'm in the area immediately west of Boston.
I think I saw arduino many times in tutorials and in many other stuff. I have a diplomas in telecommunications and in electrical installation and now I'm studying for bachelors degree in automation. I used picaxe in couple project at work and after that I had a class on atmegas. After that I used them for a while and fond arduinos easier, because I could have the board without effort. After that I have been thinking do I need the bootloader, but at the moment, I'm using arduinos. Probably heard about arduino somewhere around 2010 and been using them since 2014.
I had an interest in micro controllers more than 20 years ago but unable to do anything due to the need for special programming software and hardware. I then started playing with Picaxe as it had easy programming editor and hardware. I became aware of Arduinos and bought one to play with last year.
I am still a newbie with it but I enjoy the learning I get from partaking in the forum.
Weedpharma
August 23, 2014. I received a Uno. Discovered it in Make: magazine issue #41. The next day, there was a 7.2 earthquake.
Saint Helena, Napa Valley. I am 12.
The forum is helpful as long as you don't have Internet Explorer.