About the writer

Anya Sharma — known online, and on the cover of this magazine, as CircuitWeave — is a firmware engineer based in Bangalore. She has spent the last fourteen years writing software for things that do not, in the strict sense, look like computers: industrial sensors, smart meters, building-management controllers, consumer appliances, and the long tail of small, mostly forgotten devices that connect the physical world to the rest of it.

She writes this magazine, on most Sundays, from a desk in a flat in Indiranagar that looks out over a row of street trees and a streetlamp that has, since 2019, been faithfully reporting its uptime to a server in a data centre she has never visited.

What this magazine is

Anya's Bytes is a weekly publication on embedded systems, IoT security, and the firmware that runs in the spaces between hardware and consequence. It is written by one person. It is read, very carefully, by a small audience of engineers, regulators, and curious outsiders, to whom the editor is grateful.

The standing departments are: Embedded Systems, IoT Security, Firmware, AI Integration, and the occasional piece on Markets & Hardware. Essays appear, when they are ready, on Sunday mornings. The schedule is honoured when the writing is honest; when it is not, no issue appears.

What she has worked on

In the last decade, Anya has shipped firmware in production deployments at the order of millions of devices across South and Southeast Asia. She has consulted on security audits for two smart-city pilots, one of which was eventually cancelled for reasons that had nothing to do with the security findings. She has taught a recurring two-day workshop on embedded security at three Indian engineering colleges. She has written, under both her own name and her byline, in trade journals she does not always like to be reminded of.

She holds no patents, has founded no companies, and has, to her quiet satisfaction, never given a keynote.

A note on the prose

The writing here is not produced to a deadline that anyone but the editor sets. It is, in consequence, slower and (she hopes) more careful than the writing in the trade press. The intended audience is the engineer at the next bench: working in the field, on a real device, with a real problem, and not particularly in need of cheerleading.

Letters to the editor are read with attention. Corrections are gratefully received and acknowledged in the next issue. Devices may be sent to the editor for examination, with the understanding that not every device will be written about, and that the writing, when it appears, may not flatter the manufacturer.

— Bangalore, May 2026.