A Letter from the Editor

The first issue of a small magazine is, by tradition, an exercise in mild apology and grand intention. The editor explains, in eight hundred words, why the world needs another publication on whatever specific subject the magazine covers, and then promises a great deal more than the editor is in any position to deliver. I am going to try to do less of both.

This is a small magazine about embedded systems, IoT security, and the firmware that runs in the spaces between hardware and consequence. It is written by one person — me — in the evenings, mostly, from an apartment in Bangalore that looks out over a stretch of street that has, at any given moment, perhaps a hundred small embedded devices in line of sight. There are LED streetlights with cellular modems. There are traffic cameras with PoE injectors. There are smart meters in every building, mine included, that have been quietly reporting kilowatt-hours to servers in Hyderabad since 2018. There is, in short, no shortage of material.

What I want this magazine to be is the kind of publication I would like to read myself and have, over fifteen years in the trade, only rarely found: serious, careful writing about the small devices that run our world, in a register that takes the subject seriously without lapsing into either trade-press cheerleading or doom-mongering. The devices are interesting. The people who build them are interesting. The slow accumulation of decisions, over decades, that gives our infrastructure its particular shape is interesting, and worth describing carefully, and not at the speed of news.

What you will find here

The essays I plan to publish here fall, roughly, into four kinds.

There will be field notes, in which I write up something I have learned from looking at a particular piece of hardware in front of me. These will be biographical, in the sense that they will follow the device — where it came from, who made it, what it has been doing — rather than treating it as an abstract specimen of its class. I find the biographical mode useful, because it forces a kind of honesty about the actual conditions in which devices operate. The clinic in Pune; the textile mill in Coimbatore; the apartment building in Bangalore. The world is specific.

There will be technical pieces, in which I work through a problem in some depth — a firmware bug, an architectural choice, a question about how some particular protocol or peripheral really works. These will be longer and more demanding than the field notes, and they will, when appropriate, contain code. I will try not to make the code worse than it needs to be. I will try not to make the prose worse than it needs to be, either.

There will be essays on the trade itself. The discipline of writing firmware is, in many respects, distinct from the discipline of writing other kinds of software, and the literature on that distinction is much thinner than I think it should be. Some of these essays will be observational; some will be argumentative; all of them will, I hope, be useful to engineers earlier in their careers than I am, who are working out what kind of practitioners they want to become.

There will, finally, be occasional pieces on the wider context: the supply chains that make embedded electronics possible, the regulatory environment that does or does not protect end users, the slow industrial cadences that, more than any of the technical decisions I make at my bench, shape the kinds of systems I get to build. These will be the pieces I am least confident about. They will benefit, more than the others, from letters telling me where I have gone wrong.

What you will not find here

I am not going to write breathless press-release commentary. There are publications that do this very well; this is not one of them. If a company has announced a new microcontroller, you will read about it here only if I have spent time with the chip and have something specific to say. The release calendar of the semiconductor industry is not, in itself, news.

I am not going to write think-pieces about whether the Internet of Things is, in some grand civilisational sense, good or bad. I find that question both unanswerable and unimportant. The Internet of Things, in whatever sense it exists, is here. The interesting work is in the specifics: which devices, doing which things, in which environments, with what consequences.

I am not going to write to a schedule that I cannot reliably keep. My intention is to publish one essay a week, on Sundays. If I do not have an essay ready, I will not publish one. A small magazine that publishes occasionally, when there is something worth publishing, seems to me more valuable than one that publishes filler on schedule.

About the byline

I write under my own name, which is Anya Sharma, and under the online alias CircuitWeave, which dates from a series of forum posts I wrote in 2014 and has, by some accident, stuck. The two names refer to the same person. I have been a firmware engineer for fourteen years, mostly in industry, with brief and unedifying stints in academic research and at a startup that did not survive its Series B. I have published, in the past, in some of the embedded-systems trade journals, under both names; the writing in those publications was generally produced under deadlines I did not set, and I am not always proud of it.

This magazine is the writing I would like to be doing. The fact that nobody is paying me to do it is, in the present economy of small independent publications, both a feature and a constraint.

A note on letters

I have set up an email address for letters. I will read every letter I receive, and I will reply to as many as time allows. If you have a correction, please send it; corrections will be acknowledged in the next issue. If you have a device you would like me to look at, I am open to suggestions; I cannot promise to take every one, but the pile of devices on my desk is always smaller than the pile in my imagination.

If you have found this magazine and read this far, thank you. I will try to be worth the time.

— Anya Sharma, Bangalore, July 2024.