Hackaday article: Hackaday Celebrates 15 Years And Oh How The Hardware Has Changed

What began as a blog is now a global virtual hackerspace. That first 105-word article has grown far beyond project features to include spectacular long-form original content. From the community of readers has grown Hackaday.io, launched in 2014 you’ll now find over 30,000 projects published by 350,000 members.
As for designs themselves, silicon is no longer a black box. RISC-V is an open source hardware instruction set architecture — basically the core of a microcontroller. The game with “open” projects is that there’s always a lower layer that is proprietary, but we do our best to push that boundary lower and low. Having seen the birth of chips based on the RISC-V design, that line is now at the chip-fab level and at this point, any individual can build their own custom processor around the design and run it in an FPGA as a proof of concept. If it’s really good, and you’re really lucky, it could even become a custom chip some day and that barrier will likely become lower and lower over time.
article: https://hackaday.com/2019/09/05/hackaday-celebrates-15-years-and-oh-how-the-hardware-has-changed/