No Starch Press Blog

Break It Till You Make It: Q&A with Hardware Hackers Colin O'Flynn and Jasper van Woudenberg


To kick off the Cybersecurity Awareness Month edition of our ongoing Author Spotlight series, we're joined by Colin O’Flynn and Jasper van Woudenberg, co-authors of The Hardware Hacking Handbook (available November, 2021). In the following Q&A, we talk with Colin (@colinoflynn) and Jasper (@jzvw) about the perils of proprietary protocols being replaced with network devices, the problem of having too many interesting targets to test your tools on, the beauty of AI-designed attack systems, the indisputable power of “hammock hacking,” and why nobody cares about fault injection until they get hacked with fault injection.

Hardware Hacking Handbook Cover Colin Oflynn Jasper VanWoudenberg

Colin runs NewAE Technology, Inc., a startup based on his ChipWhisperer project that designs tools to make hardware attacks more accessible, and teaches engineers about embedded security – a topic he frequently speaks about at conferences and on tech podcasts.

Jasper is CTO of Riscure North America, where he leads the company’s pentesting teams, and has a special interest in integrating AI with security. His research has been published in various academic journals, and he’s a regular speaker at educational and hacking conferences.

No Starch Press: I’ll start by saying that your book is timely! Hardware hacking, once a niche field of the exploit world, has become far more relevant amidst the proliferation of embedded devices all around us. What do you think accounts for this, and why are side-channel attacks in particular becoming increasingly common (and difficult to prevent)?

Colin O'Flynn: Hardware hacking has been a niche field, but one with an extensive and long history. Most of the powerful attacks we’re discussing today have been demonstrated for 20 years, so I’d say they should be “well-known.” But the truth seems to be that, until recently, advanced hardware attacks weren’t needed for most IoT devices. Default passwords and unlocked debug interfaces were the norm, so most hardware hackers never needed to dig deeper. Many people I’ve talked to at events have told me they were interested in side-channel and similar advanced attacks but never had time to actually learn them, as they were always able to break devices with easier and faster attacks!

The good news is that device manufacturers seem to be taking security more seriously these days, which means side-channel attacks have become a real threat. So I guess we’re seeing the industry fast-forwarding that 20-year lag of security research to catch up.

Jasper van Woudenberg: Hacking always moves with interesting targets. Once pinball machines started requiring money to play, people “hacked” them by just tilting the whole machine. Nowadays physical pinball machines have a tilt sensor – if you tilt the machine in order to affect the ball, it ceases operation. Of course, we’re talking about digital hardware in our book, but bypassing security systems is as old as security systems. So, the abundance of digital devices naturally increases the amount of hacking going on. Side-channel attacks are fascinating if you’re into the intersection between electronics, signal processing and cryptography. Beyond being fascinating though, they only become relevant when more straightforward attacks are mitigated.

NSP: Fault injection (FI) attacks – which inject a glitch into a target device that alters its behavior so you can bypass security mechanisms – used to be too “high end” for most hackers to bother with, often requiring expensive tools and intimate technical knowledge of the specific system under attack. But those days are over. Not only are low-cost FI toolkits readily available, the explosion of IoT has led to the rise of new defensive features, like Secure Boot, that can be easily subverted by a well-timed FI attack. What are the potential risks to a larger IoT network once a device is compromised this way?

CO: In the past we’ve seen end devices used as a pivot point into a more sensitive network. When it comes to commercial devices, we’re seeing many proprietary protocols replaced with network devices. For example, recent access-control readers are now simply PoE devices that talk back to a central server. With many of these devices, the original designers haven’t considered what happens if an end node becomes compromised. While the network may be correctly secured, you still see sensitive credentials stored in end devices become accessible to an attacker. And if an attacker is able to access these credentials, it means they may be able to pivot off the external network and into more sensitive internal networks.

JVW: I think the cost of the tools is a common misunderstanding – they can be really inexpensive. In our lab, we’ve done attacks literally by soldering a single wire to a bus, connecting it to a button, and when we pressed the button at the right time, the system boots our own code. The cost usually comes from the many days and weeks spent trying to figure out how to carry out the attack. And yes, some attacks do require high-end equipment, or at least equipment that can bring down the time used to figure out the attack.

One common stepping-stone attack we see is the firmware dump. Typically, embedded-device firmware does not receive a lot of scrutiny, and may have lingering vulnerabilities that can be exploited. This usually means gaining control over a single device, but there have been wormable firmware issues in the past.

NSP: What measures can be taken to harden embedded systems against FI attacks, and do you see this happening throughout the industry (why or why not)?

JVW: We always advise our customers to threat model and see if it makes sense to consider FI in scope. Usually that’s the case for embedded systems that are out in the field and have some sensitive assets to protect. Next is the question of whether faults can be mitigated in hardware and/or software. Both is ideal, but that’s not always feasible. Our book contains a chapter on countermeasures that also has a lab, so people can try out some ideas for FI countermeasures. Finally, verification of countermeasures early and often is critical. It’s virtually impossible, as a human, to predict all the ways a system can fault. Pre-silicon fault simulation and post-silicon fault injection, without exception, turn up surprises. Iteration and adaptation are key.

And then the million-dollar question: why is the hardening not happening throughout the industry? It’s a combination of cost and human nature. There is a real engineering cost to these countermeasures, so typically we only see customers that have had their devices compromised requiring FI resistance. If a compromise hasn’t happened, it’s very easy to write the attacks off as unrealistic or irrelevant. Nobody cares about fault injection until they get hacked with fault injection.

CO: Fault injection can be tricky to prevent, as we see countermeasures applied that aren’t effective. For instance, Jasper and I demonstrate a few examples in the book where compilers might remove the effect of your clever countermeasures. There seems to be a lot more interest in this now – for many companies, they just need some “end customer” to ask about it. I talked to silicon vendors a few years ago who were tracking countermeasure ideas, but basically none of their customers (people who actually build products) cared about FI attacks. So that meant they weren’t going to pay for engineering efforts to add those countermeasures. We seem to be seeing a very fast shift in the last couple of years though, so people who were tracking this early-on are in a good position to quickly offer solutions.

NSP: Speaking of low-cost fault-injection toolkits, Colin, you developed one of the most popular models out there, the ChipWhisperer, and built a company around it (NewAE Technology). Given that just about everything we use in our homes and offices has embedded computing systems and could be vulnerable to attack, how do you pick which devices to test your boards and analysis algorithms on? An example from your book would be smart toothbrushes – are you ever doing something like brushing your teeth when it suddenly occurs to you, “Wow, I could totally hack this thing”?

CO: This is actually a big problem! Unfortunately I tend to buy a lot of devices (microcontrollers, IoT products, industrial control systems, etc.) because I think they will be interesting to poke at! As a result, I’ve got a storage cabinet full of various devices along these lines… I’m slowly working through some of them, and when we get some time at the company, we’ll pick away at one or two of those devices as well.

But as more devices include embedded security, there are more “interesting" targets than there is hope of having time to deal with them. Part of why we design many different target-board devices (our “UFO targets” for ChipWhisperer) is actually to help out other researchers by giving them an easier platform to work with.

NSP: Once you successfully exploit a commonly used product, do you let the manufacturer know or is that generally considered an exercise in futility?

CO: If I plan on talking about the issue publicly I’ll reach out, even if I don’t think it’s a serious issue. Sometimes it takes a bit of time to reach the correct person (or team), but so far they have all generally spun it into positive experiences all around.

With one ongoing disclosure, for example, the engineering team had internally flagged that there could be some issues related to a relatively unsecure microcontroller that they were using in a product, and my report had validated their internal concerns. In this case they were already working on a new design, but I’m sure my report was a nice bonus for the people involved, as they can point to that as proof that the issue would be found eventually “in the wild.” In the meantime it gave them the opportunity to provide an interim fix via a firmware update for existing customers.

NSP: Jasper, one of your specialized areas of interest is combining AI with security research. Would you explain what this entails? And looking into the future, how could AI applications be leveraged to improve hardware and embedded security at the design level?

JVW: What I love about AI is also what I love about hacking: making a computer device do more than the original designer put in. With AI, this is tying a couple of artificial neurons together and getting a cat-and-dog image detector. With hacking, this is sending some weird input into a program and all of a sudden it executes arbitrary code.

The combination, I find fascinating. For instance, we’ve used neural networks to do side-channel analysis and outperform human-designed algorithms. We created an algorithm with colleagues that automatically optimizes fault injection parameters. I’ll work very hard to create some automation so I can be – paradoxically – lazy afterwards.

I firmly believe that most if not all cognitive activities, such as designing or attacking systems, will be better performed using AI rather than brains – the big question is when. I prefer to be on the side of making systems more secure through AI, so my research is going towards automating both the detection and mitigation of vulnerabilities, at scale. For instance, a big push we have currently is in pre-silicon security – detecting side-channel and fault issues before they make it into products. I wouldn’t say we’ve arrived at using AI yet, but the first steps are being made.

NSP: Both of you have advanced degrees, which makes sense given all of the academic knowledge involved with embedded security. Yet, The Hardware Hacking Handbook makes very little assumption about a reader’s background. What was your approach to making this challenging field accessible to novices and newcomers, and why was it important enough that you wrote an entire book on this premise?

CO: My career path on paper seems relatively full of academic love – I was an assistant professor for several years in the Electrical & Computer Engineering department at Dalhousie University. But back at the start, when I was considering applying to start my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, I came relatively close to not attending university at all. I had self-taught myself a fair amount about electronics in high school, and managed to get a summer job that was effectively an electrical engineering internship, and was considering just continuing to grow with the “on the job” experience instead. In the end I fell onto the academic path, but I’ve always believed that it is not the only path, and part of this shapes my desire to make this as accessible as possible.

While many readers may be undergraduate or grad students, it’s clear that a classic academic textbook would cut out readers coming from other backgrounds (including everyone from high school students to professionals interested in looking at other careers). Practically, what we write down isn’t the only consideration – one of the great things about working with No Starch Press is that the pricing of the books makes them more accessible as well. From academic publishers, this book would have been $150+. And there would never be Humble Bumble sales that make it completely accessible on the level that NSP does!

JVW: I’ve taught courses on side-channel and fault injection for years, and it has taught me that the group of people that has to defend against these attacks is not necessarily interested in all the theory and all the research in this field. They want to focus on their goals of creating a system.

Then there’s the group of people like teenage me. I started hacking software before I had an internet connection, so I know the struggle of having to figure out everything by yourself. Looking around at the amazing blogs, videos, tutorials, etc. that exist for the software space currently, it really made me realize what a gap there is in the hardware space.

So, for both these groups, it’s really about breaking things down into practical tips and tricks, and then some of the unavoidable theoretical background. I really would like to show people that this space isn’t daunting, and that even someone like me – who came off a software background – can learn and enjoy it.

NSP: I’ll end with an easy one (I think) – what is your favorite hacking tool, and has that changed since you first got interested in hardware hacking when you were young?

CO: I should probably say my favourite tool is one of my own more-advanced products. But really, a good DMM is the most important tool! And in that regard, it hasn’t changed much over the years – one of my first “dream gifts” (back when Santa would be responsible for it) was a Fluke 12 multimeter, long before I knew about hardware hacking. I’ve since upgraded to a nicer meter (Fluke 179/EDA2 kit), but as we talk about in the book, there is so much you can do with this tool! Finding where pins go, checking the state of logic levels and voltages – it’s still my most used tool when I’m looking at a new device.

JVW: I started being “creative with technology” in the mid-’90s. What has changed is the amount of information available, and the fact that security is now an actual career – I still don’t always believe people are willing to pay me to do this. What hasn’t changed is my curiosity, and the rush that comes with solving a complex problem.

Favorite hacking tool? Hah. Although I use devices for a significant portion of the day, they are also a source of frustration. So, those are out. I’m going to say: my hammock. When I get stuck on a problem and I sense no more new ideas are being produced, or I get frustrated, I drop the problem for a few hours or days. Then I hop in my hammock for what I call “hammock hacking.” This is where I hang back and relax. I’ll almost always have a new view on the problem, or another way of connecting some dots that I hadn’t considered before. Or I fall asleep. But it’s a win in either case.

InfoSec Warrior Vickie Li: From Hunting Bugs to Helping Developers

Vickie Li is the resident developer evangelist at the application security firm ShiftLeft, and a self-described “professional investigator of nerdy stuff.” Her new book, Bug Bounty Bootcamp, leverages her expertise in offensive web security as well as her background in vulnerability research to introduce beginners to all aspects of web hacking, showing readers how to find, exploit, and report bugs through “bounty” programs. In her free time, when she’s not podcasting, speaking at conferences, or dropping infosec and cybersecurity knowledge on YouTube, she’s writing articles and blog posts about nipping security problems in the bug.

Bug Bounty Bootcamp Cover Vickie Li

For the September edition of our ongoing Author Spotlight series, we talk with Vickie about her first bug bounty payout, how her success hacking apps made her a passionate advocate for secure development, and why she means it quite literally when she tells you that becoming a good web hacker is like learning to ride a unicycle.

No Starch Press: First of all, that’s a pretty impressive intro for someone in their mid-twenties! But let’s go back a few years. You graduated with a CS degree from Northwestern, then worked as a freelance web developer before getting into infosec, pentesting, and offensive-security content creation, which – correct me if I’m wrong – led to your current full-time gig as a developer evangelist. So where did your foray into bug hunting come into play, and how did you get started with bounty programs?

Vickie Li: I got interested in security through my university courses, and started bug bounties as a way to learn more about infosec. Hacking on bug bounty programs helped me learn a lot about web hacking and web application security in general. But sitting in front of my laptop all day, I started to lose motivation because I really wanted my work to connect me with other people, and doing bug bounties all alone was quite lonely. That’s why I started my technical blog, where I wrote about whatever I was learning at the moment. I really tried to make the blog posts easy to understand, because I hoped people who were studying the same thing would find it helpful.

My blog actually kickstarted my career in infosec. Because of it, I was able to get some freelance penetration testing and technical writing jobs, and eventually landed my current job at ShiftLeft. Knowing how to explain complex technical concepts also helped me with writing Bug Bounty Bootcamp and making it an approachable web-hacking book.

NSP: What was your first real catch, and what was it like earning your first paid bounty?

VL: I found my first paid bug – a CSRF – about a week into hunting for bugs. The bounty was just a hundred dollars, but it was amazing to be able to earn a bit of money as I learned about the field. The most memorable part about the experience was when [the company’s] security team triaged the bug I found, and fixed it on the website. It was very motivating to know that I can contribute to the security of a widely used site through my work!

NSP: Over the past year you’ve gone from working as a freelancer/bug hunter to a full-time gig as a “developer evangelist” – a job focused on bridging communications between external dev teams and your internal app-security colleagues. Can you elaborate on what exactly your day-to-day is like, and how it satisfies your infosec interests?

VL: My primary role at ShiftLeft involves making secure coding practices approachable for developers, and spreading the word about how static analysis can help in this process. Every day is different: I might be writing a blog post, preparing to speak at a conference, or helping my team understand the needs of developers during the security process. I really enjoy the work because it fits into my original motivation for getting into infosec: helping make the internet a safer place for everyone.

NSP: The name of your company refers to shifting security to the left – or, introducing security checks earlier in the development life cycle rather than at the end. You underscored this in a blog post, comparing app security to wearing a facemask during the pandemic (“Building a Security-First Culture”). At the same time, your book is about hunting for zero-day vulnerabilities and getting started in bounty programs. Do you ever worry that if you’re too good at your job there won’t be any more bugs to hunt?

VL: I am not worried about that. Shifting left and bug bounties are not an either-or situation. These practices work together to help organizations become more secure. Bug bounty hunters are creative and are constantly coming up with new ways to attack an application. Organizations can use bug bounty programs to tackle new and inventive attack vectors before malicious attackers discover them. But most bugs should still be discovered early in the development cycle, when they are the easiest to fix. Shifting left will help eliminate most security vulnerabilities in your applications, and bug bounties can help you catch the rest.

NSP: To take this question in the opposite direction, has your bug-hunting experience helped or informed your current work advocating for better security practices?

VL: During my time as a bug bounty hunter, I helped lots of developer teams fix security issues in their applications. That’s when I noticed that many serious security vulnerabilities stem from small programming mistakes that could be easily discovered with static analysis. It’s easier to find and fix vulnerabilities early in the development process because you do not risk an attacker exploiting it in production.

This experience made me a really passionate advocate for secure development and security education. Offensive security practices like penetration testing or bug bounties are a great way to secure your applications, but they should only be used as a fail-safe to catch novel bug classes and vulnerabilities that slip past security protocols during the development cycle.

NSP: The AppSec space, and the cybersecurity industry as a whole, lives in a constant state of change, with new types of exploits emerging every day. How do you keep up with the ever-evolving landscape?

VL: I’m known to be quiet on social media, but I actually use Twitter a lot – mostly to get informed on the latest security news and understand the security challenges people are currently facing. In other words, I am the classic Twitter lurker. I also read a lot of infosec books, and follow a few well-written security blogs and YouTube channels.

NSP: Are there any online resources (besides your own) that you can recommend to aspiring web hackers, bug hunters, or security researchers?

VL: I am a big fan of reading security books to gain in-depth knowledge about a topic, and then reading blog posts for the latest infosec techniques – Orange Tsai’s blog is one of my favorites. He is a really creative hacker and has been a big inspiration for me ever since I started. Also, Web Security Academy by PortSwigger is a great starting point for web hackers who want to get some hands-on experience.

NSP: Okay, I’ve saved the most pressing question for last. You recently posted on Twitter that you were having a hard time selling your unicycle. This implies that 1) you own a unicycle, and 2) that you know how to ride a unicycle. Do tell.

VL: Happy to announce that I have sold my unicycle to a new loving owner! I learned to unicycle in college because I’ve always thought it’s cool to have an uncommon skill like unicycling. Unicycling is really hard to learn! It took me countless falls and months of practice to finally learn to ride it in a straight line.

But, this experience really boosted my confidence in learning. Like web hacking, learning to unicycle is hard but possible if you put your mind to it and persist. Now when I am trying to learn something difficult, I know I can ‘cause hey – I learned to unicycle! 10/10 would recommend unicycling as a sport. There are few things in this world cooler than a unicycling hacker.

Engineer Angel Sola Explains How Math is in Everything (Including Beer)

For Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, we’ve been spotlighting some of our favorite math/stats books – and the brilliant number ninjas who write them.

Angel Sola Orbaiceta Hardcore Programming for Mechanical Engineers

As we enter the final week of #MathStatMonth, our focus is on software engineer and author Angel Sola Orbaiceta, whose new book, Hardcore Programming for Mechanical Engineers, comes out in June (and is available now for pre-order). Angel earned his university degree in Industrial Engineering, but has worked in the software industry since graduating over a decade ago. He currently serves as Senior Software Engineer at Glovo, a Barcelona-based quick-commerce startup that provides on-demand delivery services via its popular mobile app. Angel is also the creator of InkStructure, a software application for architecture and engineering students that solves 2D structural problems.

In the wonderfully illuminating conversation below, we talk with him about why math is so key to engineering (and everything else), how his IE background gives him an edge in software development (and why all engineers should learn to code), how statistics keep projects on budget, what data analysts have in common with gold miners, and how getting the math wrong when you home-brew beer is – literally – the stuff of nightmares.

1) As most of our readers probably know, mathematics is the foundation for many science and engineering disciplines. Given that you majored in industrial engineering (IE) – with an intensification in mechanics – at university, would you please explain why math is so important to engineering in general?

In the words of the genius Galileo Galilei: “Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe.” Thanks to math, we can describe physical phenomena, measure events, and make predictions. Most of the principles our engineering designs rely on are given in the form of mathematical equations. Take for instance the well-known Newton’s law of universal gravitation:

Newton’s law of universal gravitation

This simple and beautiful equation describes the gravitational force that any two bodies with masses “M” and “m” laying anywhere in our universe, a distance of “r” apart, exert on each other. Thanks to this piece of math, engineers have been able to do the calculations necessary to launch satellites to space. How cool is that? Fun fact: we know this formula isn’t exactly right thanks to Einstein’s general relativity ideas; nature is a bit more nuanced than that. But, when the bodies we study aren’t moving at speeds close to the speed of light, the results yielded by Newton’s formula are so incredibly accurate that engineers still use them.

Math is everywhere, behind every technological advancement we know. Even behind the best kept secrets of big companies like Google or Uber. In my current company, Glovo (we’re similar to Uber Eats, DoorDash or Deliveroo), we use math for everything! For instance, to make the optimal assignment of the customers’ orders to the available couriers, such that the time customers have to wait to get their order is minimized and the amount of money couriers make is maximized, we solve a linear optimization problem. There is a lot of math going on behind our algorithm. If we weren’t good at math, couriers would earn little money and customers would get their food cold.

It’s also important to note that Engineering syllabi usually have a very high load of mathematics, some of it a bit abstract for most students. It’s only when you start solving real engineering problems that those abstract mathematical concepts might turn into useful tools. I remember my first year in university, we had this algebra course and I was incredibly lost; I couldn’t understand anything. We learned about linear and affine transformations; I would simply complete the assignments mechanically, without pondering on what those meant. Some years later, I started working on InkStructure (an application I developed to do structural analysis, which includes a CAD-like drawing canvas) and found out that, to zoom in or out the drawing, I needed to apply affine transformations. That was an Eureka! moment for me. As I explain in my book, the first versions of the application had a weird zoom in/out behaviour, and that is because it took me some time to fully grasp the math behind affine transformations. The Youtube channel 3Brown1Blue did a much better job explaining me those concepts in a graphical manner than my university professors (thanks, Grant!).

Follow-up Q: Which math applications do you need to study (and understand) to excel in these fields? Alternatively, is engineering still a good career choice for people who are not good at math – like, could a computer simply solve all the math-related problems you’d encounter?

Math is key in engineering, one of the most powerful tools at our disposal, but you don’t need to be a math genius to become a good engineer. At least, this is how I see it. But I also think it depends on the specific engineering discipline. In the software field, for instance, math might not be strictly necessary; you can get along just with high school math. I know many good software engineers who don’t have a strong math background, yet produce some of the best designed software I’ve seen. But for civil or mechanical engineers, a strong math background is more important. A good understanding of linear algebra, calculus, differential equations and statistics is key for these engineering disciplines. Electrical engineers make extensive use of complex numbers, so complex analysis is necessary for them. And in the case of industrial engineering, linear and non-linear optimization is important as well.

In any case, we have at our disposal very good software that does most of the tedious math for us; and yet, we still need to know about how that math works, so the results of that software don’t appear like some kind of magic and we’re able to correctly interpret them. Hardcore Programming for Mechanical Engineers is precisely about writing such software: software that automates the resolution of engineering problems, which usually involve a lot of math. If we have computers which do billions of operations in a single second, why not hand them the tedious, automatable calculations?

2) You’ve noted that you taught yourself programming while at university in order to solve engineering problems. Post-graduation, you took these skills and went right into the software industry. How do you think your IE training has helped you succeed in software development? And based on your experience, do you see a need for more STEM graduates (who understand basic scientific principles) in software engineering?

What I think is key about the Industrial Engineering program I took is that, on top of the algebra, math and physics foundations, we touched on a lot of disciplines: structural analysis, mechanics, design of machines, electric circuits, electronics, energy production and distribution, microprocessors, manufacturing, statistics and many more. This rich knowledge foundation is invaluable to write software that solves a broad range of problems. Because if you think about it, software is basically a way of automating the solution to a problem through leveraging the power of computing. Knowing how to find an effective solution to a problem in the first place is also a great skill for a Software Engineer to have. Also, project management plays a big role in the study of industrial engineering, and creating software requires big doses of project management.

I think it’s for this exact same reason that we need more STEM graduates to get acquainted with Software Engineering principles, so they write the next generation of scientific and engineering software. Most of us STEM graduates learn coding at university, but writing good software goes beyond mastering “for” loops and “if” statements. When I graduated, I was naive enough to think that, since I knew how to program, I was ready to write good software. It took me some years of industry experience and sleepless nights reading software engineering books to start understanding how real software is produced. I recently
wrote a blog post
about two important lessons I’ve learnt in this respect.

I would definitely encourage everyone in the STEM field to learn coding plus some software engineering principles and practices. And hey – engineering students and professionals alike, give a read to read my book, as it has some of the most important lessons I’ve learnt along the way!

3) Your book is about learning to solve engineering problems with Python – from scratch – using math concepts, like linear algebra and geometry. But there’s also a focus on writing clean code, building libraries, and automated unit testing. How do all of these disciplines (math, statistics, programming, etc.) fit together in engineering applications, and why is it important for mechanical engineering students and professionals to learn how to code?

Exactly! And let me start by saying you’ve summarized the intent of the book quite nicely. Computers have become the main and most important tool for us engineers. In the past, that might have been the abacus, a compass, or a pocket calculator. But today, a computer with specialized software installed is the most effective tool we have. Nobody in their right mind would draw the blueprints for a bridge or skyscraper by hand anymore; now we use AutoCAD, and that makes us hundreds of times more productive than the engineers from a century ago who did all this by hand. By the same token, no civil engineer works out the stresses on every structural member of a bridge by hand anymore, either – that would take months of work and can be error-prone. We have great software today that we use instead, capable of doing that type of analysis in a couple minutes and with no calculation errors.

So if computers are the modern engineers' best tool, why not learn to give it instructions directly (that is, learn programming)? In the end, someone needs to design and write those software applications engineers use, right? Who’s better than the engineer that would use it themselves? For me, this is the most important reason why I think all engineers should learn how to code, even if they don’t plan to work for the software industry directly. And if they decide they want to write software of their own, they’ll need to be acquainted with some important Software Engineering topics, such as how to architect their code, distribute it in reusable libraries, and have automated tests to know it remains bug-free as they code. I believe all of this is so important, I wanted to bundle it all in a single book that could become a good reference for engineers who want to write software. I wish someone had done this earlier so I could have learned all this when I was an engineering student. Most books on programming targeted at engineers miss the “code quality” part: they teach you about programming, but miss the software engineering part, which is every bit as important.

4) Now let’s talk about statistics. There’s an old engineering axiom that goes, “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” Why are statistical concepts so useful in engineering?

Statistics show up in most engineering disciplines, in many different ways. There’s one example that I find very insightful, and it’s about structural analysis. Construction structures in some parts of the world (such as Japan or Taiwan) are designed to withstand strong typhoons and powerful earthquakes. But the probability of having the strongest of the typhoons and the deadliest of the earthquakes happening at the same time is quite low. In fact, we can compute – using statistical models – the most likely combination of those forces of nature, so that the probability of the building collapsing is almost negligible and the usage of construction material is minimized.

These days, one of the best paid jobs in the tech industry is a Data Analyst. These professionals have a strong statistics background and are capable of, among other things, making predictions based on studies done with large amounts of data. I find it really remarkable the fact that there’s so much valuable information hidden in large amounts of data – which, using the right statistical tools, can be brought to the surface and used to make more-educated business decisions. I see this in my current company. Our data analysts are amazing! We have regular sessions with them where they show us their findings, and it’s so incredible to see how the answer to many of our “unanswered questions” were always there, lying right in front of our eyes but hidden behind petabytes of data. It only required the right set of statistics skills to be revealed. It’s as if the answers are gold inside a mine, and statistics are the pick and shovel necessary to extract them.

Follow-up Q: What is the difference between how statistics and statistical principles are used in IE or mechanical engineering versus how they’re used in software engineering?

For industrial engineering, to name one example, statistics are key to designing effective manufacturing processes: Preventive maintenance can be put in place thanks to statistical studies that predict when a given machine might break down or fail, so it can be acted upon before that happens and without the need to halt the entire assembly line. Another example can be risk management for any given engineering project. Any risky conditions that could put the project at stake need to be accounted for, but designing a solution that’s safe in every possible scenario usually increases the cost of a project considerably. So, instead of assuming all of those conditions will be a problem 100% of the time – and to the maximum extent of their risk potential – you can run statistical experiments to determine the most likely level of risk the project should account for. These types of statistical analyses keep the project budget reasonable, while ensuring the engineering solution is as safe as necessary.

In the software field, the usages are not that different from the other cases. Software projects are like any other engineering project – they have risks to manage, and those can be analyzed using statistical models. But besides that, there is a very interesting technique we use often in software that allows us to know whether a change brings value to users or not: A/B tests. In an A/B test we show randomly chosen users a new version of the feature, (what we call “version A”). The rest of the users still see “version B,” which is how the app looks without the proposed change. We then measure if version A performs better with users than version B. If that improvement does indeed have statistical significance, we implement the change for all users. This technique has a special place in my heart because I was part of the team who built the A/B test infrastructure at Glovo.

5) One of your hobbies outside of designing software (and writing a book) is brewing your own beer. Salud! Are there any engineering skill sets, such as the use of math and statistics, that help you in endeavoring to craft the perfect pint?

This is the best question I’ve been asked in a long time! Let me start with an anecdote about how not getting the math right during the brewing process can yield “interesting” results.

Since I’m not a professional brewer, I typically follow other brewers’ beer recipes. I like to brew Imperial IPAs (aka double IPAs), which use a large amount of hops and happen to be my favorite style of beer. Some time ago, I was feeling adventurous and decided that I’d design my own recipe. I’m not sure what exactly went wrong – perhaps I calculated the proportion of hops wrong incorrectly – but that beer gave me weird nightmares every time I drank one before going to sleep (100% of the time, thus making it statistically significant). And not just any kind of nightmares, I’m talking about “how can my brain be so messed up” sort of nightmares. Most people aren’t aware of this, but hops come from a plant belonging to the Cannabinaceae family – a fact that might have something to do with the nightmares part, but who knows? I think this story of me getting the math wrong and brewing a nightmare-factory beverage exemplifies how important math can be, even for simply creating a liquid that’s pleasurable to drink.

Apart from that anecdote, the truth is there actually is math behind the art of brewing; maybe just elementary math, but math nonetheless. For instance, recipes usually refer to quantities as proportions with respect to the amount of water used, so you need to calculate the amount of each ingredient depending on your desired volume of brewed beer. And, to measure the amount of alcohol present in the final product, we rely on the density difference between the wort both before and after the fermentation process – which, when plugged into a mathematical expression, gives us the alcohol percentage by volume. But this is just me being a brewer noob. I’m sure professional brewers could give us many more examples!

You can also do statistical analyses with homebrewed beers. For instance, you could check whether there is any correlation between, say, drinking your newly brewed double IPA and having nightmares. Or, compute the likelihood of your friends being more likely to come over for a barbecue when you brew a certain style of beer… I’ll conclude by noting that I’m quite sure there are some mathematicians who have demonstrated their best theorems after a few beers. So, yes, you could say beer and math go hand-in-hand.

Tech Entreprenerd Tracy Osborn Wants Women to Know What They’re Worth (and Ask For a Raise!)

For Women’s History Month, No Starch Press is spotlighting the contributions and individual achievements that female authors have made in the world of tech and on our bookshelves.

Each week we'll shine your attention on just a few of these remarkable women in tech

Hello Web DesignTracy Osborn

This week, the focus is on designer-developer-author-”entreprenerd” Tracy Osborn, who is program director for Tiny Seed, a year-long accelerator for bootstrapped businesses. She’s built websites and worked with startups for two decades, before launching her own (WeddingLovely.com), but eventually pivoted to helping other tech-based seed-stage businesses grow. All the while, she’s been churning out uniquely accessible “Hello” web-dev e-books for beginners (in addition to speaking about female entrepreneurship and design on the conference circuit).

Her first book with No Starch Press, Hello Web Design, comes out this month. Fortunately, she made time to talk with us about making coding tutorials more inclusive, her battles with social anxiety, finding joy in a career change, her biggest mistake, and how women need to face their fears in order to ask for the salary they deserve.

1) A decade ago you taught yourself how to code Python and Django in order to build the web platform for your former startup, WeddingLovely.com. Yet, much of the impetus for your Hello web-dev book series was the frustration you felt with all of the programming tutorials you came across in the process. What were the shortcomings that you identified, and how are the tutorials that you created in response different?

It all goes back to when I went to university — I originally majored in Computer Science. Growing up with the advent of the web, I always loved building websites (yes, those funky table layouts) and I thought my love would translate well to CSC. Unfortunately, the way that the university taught programming (and how most tutorials and resources teach programming) did not fit how my brain worked. It was very conceptual and theoretical, when I just wanted to build something and see others use it. Consequently, I thought I was terrible at programming and I switched majors to Art.

I realized later on when I learned programming in a way that worked for me (project-based, step-by-step building, reduced theory, a “win” at the end) that there was an opportunity to share how I learned with others who shared my struggle. Web development was first, but this way of teaching can apply to most beginner subjects — I believe theory can come later once you have a feel for how to do the basics.

Follow-up: Do you believe your approach to teaching design makes the craft more inclusive?

Absolutely. While my tutorials work universally, I find that folks who don’t identify as white and male are drawn to them more. And the more we can teach these beginner subjects to a wide range of folks, the more diverse these areas will be once folks get to intermediate and advanced levels.

2) Women suffer from social anxiety at nearly twice the rate of men. In fact, you’ve noted that it was your own social anxiety that, regretfully, kept you from utilizing the mentors, networking opportunities, and career connections offered by the San Francisco startup accelerator you took part in for WeddingLovely. Fast forward to today, and you not only speak at conferences all over the world, you’re the Program Director at a (different) accelerator program. How did you conquer your social fears, and what advice do you have for other aspiring female tech entrepreneurs who struggle with this type of anxiety?

Oh gosh, I am still working on this. I wouldn’t call my social anxiety conquered, but greatly reduced. I was able to identify my triggers — lack of confidence and feeling isolated and alone — and once identified, I was able to figure out tactics that would boost my confidence and surround me with folks I felt comfortable with. Speaking at conferences was huge for this, as being a “speaker” raised my confidence and gave me a set of other people at a conference (other speakers) that I could latch onto when I was feeling alone. It’s odd saying that one of my greatest tools against social anxiety is public speaking, but it really did wonders.

I’m aware this might not work for others (as public speaking is a whole other set of anxiety); for anyone else, I would recommend to looking at the past and identify those pain points and those triggers, as once you have a specific action that you can pinpoint (like lack of confidence), you can better form tactics to improve that area rather than working on nebulous “anxiety.”

3) Sort of along these same lines is the fear of rejection, or of the unknown, that seems to disproportionately affect women’s career trajectories, particularly when navigating the tech industry. In your case, you spent your entire life excelling because of your technical prowess – from a kid creating websites, to getting a BFA in graphic design, to running a web-based startup and selling programming tutorials. Then you shut down WeddingLovely in 2018 and went in a completely different direction, taking on a Program Manager role at TinySeed, where you work with people not computers. What led to the departure from your wheelhouse, and how does it square with your career trajectory up to that point? More importantly, what can other women facing a major change in their career path learn from your experience?

My joy comes from helping others, and every role I’ve had has had an aspect of that in some way: WeddingLovely, my goal was to help small and local wedding vendors receive more business; with my books, I wanted to help folks learn new skills that they could apply to their career. TinySeed is yet another way I can work with folks and improve their lives, as my day-to-day role is being the main person our founders interact with and I guide the direction of the accelerator program. I find that I feel the most fulfilled when I am able to improve someone else’s life in some small way, and I love that my day job now revolves around being a people-person.

Career changes are immensely difficult but I hope that any career change comes with a better understanding of what brings a person joy. It’s scary taking on something completely new, but I find that being stuck in an unhappy role or position is even scarier. Plus, if you’re like me, something completely new can be invigorating.

4) Changing tracks (no pun intended) let’s talk about women getting paid. The gender wage gap persists, with women still earning 22% less than men for the same work more than 50 years after the Equal Pay Act. The World Economic Forum estimates it will take 217 years to close that gap – which actually went up from 170 last year. One thing women can do to affect change is simple: Ask for more money. But the vast majority don’t. You’ve directly addressed this issue, noting that the scariest moment in your career was orchestrating a 55% raise. What advice do you have for women who can’t imagine taking a bold approach to salary negotiation?

The doesn’t-feel-great-but-it’s-true answer is “what’s the worst that could happen?” Ideally, the worst that could happen is a “no.” Folks fear that the worst that could happen would be a demotion or even having an employment offer rescinded or being fired — and in that case, I would ask those folks, “Would you want to work at this company if that is their reaction to you having this conversation?” Probably not. In fact, the most likely outcome is your manager coming back with a counter-offer. So it comes down to internalizing that the worst that could happen is finding out that the company you’re working for isn’t on your side and that you should find something different, the best that could happen is that you get your raise, and the likely outcome is that you get some sort of salary increase. Breaking it down like this makes salary negotiation easier to do (but unfortunately it’ll never be easy.)

For folks already in a role and wanting a raise, there is something you can do if you have the time. It can be immensely helpful to interview at other companies while you’re in your role and before you ask for your raise, as it gives you negotiation practice, and, if you get an offer, and real number you can anchor your salary negotiations to (not to mention, if you have an offer, it gives you something to fall back to if your current role does indeed decide to let you go.) This involves a lot of juggling, but the process of interviewing for another job can be incredibly helpful for boosting your own confidence.

5) Back when you were running a startup and heavily involved in the programming world, you wrote about attending conferences, events and meetups where you were, literally, the only woman in the room. Sure, we’ve seen positive developments – Crunchbase reports that the number of female founders doubled from 10% of global startups in 2009 to 20% in 2019. And yet there remains a huge disparity in access to venture capital. Fortune recently found that even though the startup world raised 13% more from VCs in 2020 compared to 2019, companies founded solely by women received less investment than in 2019, accounting for just 2.2% of the $150 billion raised last year. Does this track with your own experience as a female entrepreneur, and – now that you work on the investment side of things – what options do aspiring female founders have for getting a foothold in Silicon Valley?

Absolutely. I feel that diversity has made huge strides in technology in the last decade, but sometimes it can feel as though venture capital is still in the dark ages. Traditional venture capital revolves around folks looking for a pattern, and when you don’t look like the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, you have to work 10x harder to prove that you deserve investment.

One of my biggest mistakes when looking for venture capital when I was working on my last startup was not understanding that venture capitalists say they want to change the world and invest in those that are, but they also really need to see actionable ways you’ll be returning their investment multiple times over. I hate talking about money, and I find that a lot of female founders are the same — we want to talk more about the future and how our product will be but not about how the product is working right now (fit feels like bragging?) and how that directly leads to money money money. It’s gross, but folks who can lean into the gross can have better venture capital outcomes.

However, (and this is one of the reasons I work at TinySeed), I don’t want to encourage female founders to learn how to play the game if they don’t want to. Bootstrapping (growing your company without outside investment) or finding ways to fund your company with just an initial bit of money — like what TinySeed does — means more sustainable companies for folks who don’t want to do the VC rollercoaster. They don’t have to work 80+ hour work weeks, they can have families, side projects, other passions. I want more women to be funded, but I feel like we need more alternatives to just VC, as this will also increase diversity.

Software Guru Marianne Bellotti Doesn't Have Time for Big Tech's BS

For Women’s History Month, No Starch Press is spotlighting the contributions and individual achievements that female authors have made in the world of tech and on our bookshelves.

Kill It with FireMarianne Bellotti

This week, the focus is on software engineer extraordinaire and legacy-systems expert Marianne Bellotti (@bellmar). Her new book, Kill It with Fire (April 2021), reflects her internationally known work on some of the oldest, messiest computer systems in the world, and is rich with historical contexts for advancements in technology, fascinating case studies, flexible modernization frameworks, and her trademark wit. Bellotti currently runs Identity and Access Control at Rebellion Defense; prior to that, she oversaw platform services at Auth0, served on a technical SWAT team in the U.S. Digital Service, and built data infrastructure for the United Nations.

Below, we talk with Marianne about following social science into Big Tech, why a learning disability became her biggest career strength, how diversity affects software output, and the best advice she ever got.

No Starch Press: You took a fairly unconventional path to software engineering. For one, you’re completely self-taught; and, even though you were a fairly prolific hacker in high school, you blew off Silicon Valley to travel, study anthropology, and pursue a career in international development. Eventually, of course, you did get lured into the tech industry, where you’re now pretty much at the top of your field. What led to the pivot?

Marianne Bellotti: I was very interested in social systems. Actually I still am! A lot of Kill It With Fire can be described as organization theory. So I didn’t really change my mind about what I wanted to do, stuff I wanted to do just moved into the tech industry. At the time I went to college, being in technology on the east coast meant working for the banks, or maybe a Fortune 500 company. There was no Facebook. There was no Twitter. Google was just a search engine. Ten years later, the data science movement was getting ramped up and all the interesting activity around social science was shifting towards the way the ubiquity of computers was changing how people organized and interacted.

NSP: Given that it’s often difficult for women to “make it” in tech via traditional means (advanced degrees, networking, etc.), is there something to be said – based on your experience – for going your own way?

MB: The biggest advantage I had making it in tech was actually an experience I had in grade school. When I was eight years old I was diagnosed with a sensory processing disorder, which is a type of learning disability. I struggled in school a lot at first, and then as I found my rhythm I had to deal with the social stigma of having a disability. The attitude of people around me was that I couldn’t possibly compete with “normal” children and if I did better than the “normal” children it was clearly because I cheated. It broke my spirit for a while. I didn’t want to try, because what was the point? It was an awful time, but it came in handy when I entered technology.

Women in technology get treated exactly the same. Many people will assume you can’t possibly be as good as the men, and if you’re in the room it’s because you somehow cheated or because standards have been lowered. By the time I got into technology I had realized that those experiences I had in school were bullshit and I regretted giving up on myself. So when people tried to convince me I couldn’t be successful here because I was a girl, I didn’t internalize it. I just ignored it and kept going.

Some of the best software engineers I know come from non-traditional backgrounds. It’s not about degrees or credentials, it’s about giving yourself a chance. For some people the structure and credibility of a degree will give them the confidence to fight for a place in the room where things are happening. For people like me it was more about having other skills that could be super useful to gatekeepers. But one approach isn’t more effective than the other. You need to be resilient.

NSP: There’s a lot of talk these days about closing tech’s gender gap. After all, women make up less than a quarter of the technology workforce, and even fewer are in government tech roles. Are there solutions for making the field more inclusive, regardless of sector? And, as someone who’s literally written the book on the subject (Hiring Engineers), in what way can recruitment efforts or hiring processes help resolve this?

MB: I really believe that you don’t recruit diverse talent, you grow it. I think more engineering managers need to understand the dynamics of experience level. People assume that you should always hire the most experienced, most talented person you can. If you can fill a team with All Star talent, you should. But when you study how teams actually work, you learn that isn’t a recipe for success. All Star talent needs to own big projects. So if you fill your team with All Stars, they will end up burned out trying to run all the big projects they’ve started by themselves. My rule of thumb is when I need my team to deepen their expertise I fill out junior and mid-career roles. When I need to increase my team’s responsibilities, I hire senior engineers.

When junior roles are not an afterthought, it becomes much easier to plug in diverse recruiting efforts. I watch a lot of teams try to hire all senior, then someone comes through the pipeline who is just below the standard for senior and all of a sudden the team hires them for a more junior role that didn’t exist before. That’s a strategy that’s going to result in homogeneous teams, because the people who we see “great potential” in tend to be people who remind us of ourselves. So an equal candidate from an under-represented group doesn’t get a junior role created for them.

The other thing that kills diversity in recruiting is trying to hire and grow fast. It’s just math. Under-represented groups are going to be rare, if your goal is to hire the first qualified person who makes it through your pipeline, that person is probably going to be a white or asian guy. If you want a more diverse group to choose from you need to factor in some lead time to source candidates. Right now I’m working on finding leads for what I expect to be hiring in late Q3. I do a lot of my own sourcing. I don’t just sit back and wait for recruiting to send me candidates. (For that reason people who are interested in working with me should definitely reach out over Twitter and ask for a 30-minute coffee date! 😉)

NSP: To take this in a more granular direction, and one that speaks to your roots in anthropology, let’s talk about the gender gap in terms of Conway’s Law – the old adage that software mirrors the shape of the company that makes it (e.g., the org chart, team structures, etc.). Is there a parallel with how the lack of diversity in most tech settings is not only a matter of equitable representation but also one of technology’s impact on society being adversely affected by a perpetually male-dominated perspective?

MB: This is a super interesting question! We know from various studies that diverse teams make better decisions not because of different perspectives but because diversity makes people uncomfortable – it puts them on edge – which leads to more critical thinking. At the same time, I think the minority/majority experience does create its own set of assumptions that influence what problems you think need solving. It’s possible. And certainly it’s true that people from marginalized groups will see a different context around proposed approaches, particularly in civic tech.

NSP: You’ve talked about experiencing “imposter syndrome” early in your tech career – that little voice in our heads that says we’re not nearly as competent or talented as the people around us think we are. Struggling with feelings of professional inadequacy can either hold women back from taking on leadership roles in tech, or cause them to avoid/drop out of the field altogether. From an organizational standpoint, what can be done to better support and nurture young women entering the technology industry?

MB: I still experience imposter syndrome all the time. I find that the more of a reputation I develop as an “expert,” the more I enjoy playing the neophyte. It keeps me grounded by putting how difficult it is to learn things on display for others. It seems counterintuitive, but if I hid behind my reputation I feel like my imposter syndrome would get worse. By exploring things I don’t understand and being vocal about not understanding them, I feel much more comfortable with my place in the industry. For example, lately I’ve been learning program language design, and podcasting about my experiences trying to understand that stuff in a series called “Marianne Writes a Programming Language” – twenty-minute episodes of me missing lots of obvious things and needing experts to explain things multiple times just so that I know what to look up via Google later.

In general, I find that women tend not to believe any praise they receive for their technical skills. The best advice I ever got on this was from Mikey Dickerson. He interrupted me while I was in the middle of explaining how I wasn’t qualified for something and just said “you didn’t trick us, we know who we hired.” Pumping people up is the wrong approach. People need to feel seen. When he said this, it gave me a lot of confidence, even though it was a gentle admission of my flaws as a software engineer. And throughout my career, these moments of vulnerability have been the most valuable in fighting back imposter syndrome. When a very senior person confides in you that they don’t understand something, or are afraid to do something, it changes your perspective on your own self-doubt. I try to do the same for others. It’s not about being critical, it’s about breaking down the assumption that smart people are smart without trying.

CS Curriculum Developer Sam Taylor Drops Some Knowledge

For Women’s History Month, No Starch Press is spotlighting the contributions and individual achievements that female authors have made in the world of tech and on our bookshelves.

Sam TaylorThe Coding Workbook

This week, the focus is on Sam Taylor, M.Ed., a Bay Area curriculum developer, computer-science education advocate, and author of The Coding Workbook (Jan. ’21). While teaching STEM to middle school students, she taught herself how to code and build websites, then began blogging about what she had learned as a way to help other beginners with HTML and CSS. Those tutorials became the basis for her book, which guides grade schoolers and teachers alike through the basics and web development without the need for a computer or high-speed internet – resources that aren’t available in many low-income areas of the country.

In the following Q&A, Sam talks with us about the future of women in the technology workforce, making computer science (CS) more accessible to girls, the benefits of learning to code at an early age, and how the tech industry can work with schools to help close the “digital divide.”

No Starch Press: You started out in the teaching profession, a field in which the vast share of practitioners are women, then transitioned into the male-dominated tech industry. From that vantage point, do you feel hopeful that we will someday see the end of such stark gender imbalances in the workforce – particularly as it relates to STEM?

Sam Taylor: One of the first teams I worked on when I made the transition into tech had just one other woman and five men. At the time I didn’t realize that this was a common trend, until I started to make friends with other women in the tech industry. Luckily, even in the past few years, I’ve met and seen more and more amazing women take on various technical roles in the industry (software engineers, data scientists, product managers, etc.) or even just become more visible in the roles they’d already assumed! I have a ton of optimism for the female future of the tech workforce as we see more and more incredibly smart and diverse women taking on technical and leadership positions.

NSP: The number of women in computer science has actually decreased since the 1980s, when nearly 40% of CS majors were women. Today that figure has dipped below 20%. You yourself got your bachelor's degree in psychology and it was only later, while you were working as a teacher, that you learned to code completely on your own. Do you think more girls will pursue STEM careers if they are taught CS at an early age?

ST: As coding and technical skills become more in-demand, I think it is critical that we give as many young girls access to computer-science education as possible. That means creating clubs, after-school programs, and other opportunities to engage girls in STEM-related fields of study and show them all the career possibilities. Another important thing to do is expose them as much as possible to the many real-life role models they can be inspired by in tech, as well as everyday women making a difference in the world through their work in various STEM roles.

NSP: Most of the top 10 highest-paying college majors are in STEM. Research has even shown that one year after graduation, male and female coders were earning the same salary – meaning that more women in tech could help eliminate the gender wage gap. That aside, what are other benefits to be gained from girls learning to code?

ST: I think there are so many benefits to learning to code at an early age, such as learning how to collaborate with others, figuring out solutions to complex problems, and learning ‘how to fail’ and quickly bounce back through perseverance. Coding also allows you to explore your creativity in new and exciting ways! And to be honest, I just love to see and hear about women in tech getting paid what they’re worth, asking for and earning raises, and ultimately succeeding.

NSP: Technical knowledge and skills are now considered vital for full participation in 21st-century life, yet most states are only just now beginning to adopt CS learning standards – and with little in the way of federal support. As a professional curriculum developer and the new author of an offline coding workbook for grade schoolers, do you think the tech industry itself has a role to play in helping the public-education sector close its digital divide and ensure every student is taught essential computational skills?

ST: One of the results of the coronavirus pandemic is that more light has been shined on the digital divide – or, the divide in learning between those who have access to the internet and modern technology tools and those who don’t. I’ve seen different tech companies work to help get laptops, high-speed WiFi, and other resources into schools to help students who would otherwise lack those resources. But I think the tech industry can do more to support computer-science literacy in high-need areas by finding ways to provide mentorship, technological support, and just hands-on learning experiences in general – rooted in equity.

Article-19 Activists Mallory Knodel and Ulrike Uhlig Reimagine the Internet

For Women’s History Month, No Starch Press is spotlighting the contributions and individual achievements that female authors have made in the world of tech and on our bookshelves.

Mallory Knodel How the Internet Really Works Ulrike Uhlig

This week, the focus is on two of the co-authors behind How the Internet Really Works (Dec. 2020), a collaborative work produced by Article 19 activists. Mallory Knodel is the CTO of the Center for Democracy & Technology, co-chair of the Human Rights and Protocol Considerations group of the Internet Research Task Force, an advisor to the Freedom Online Coalition, and former head of digital for ARTICLE 19, where she integrated a human rights-centred approach to communications and technology work for social justice movements. Ulrike Uhlig is a (comic) artist, graphic designer, front-end web developer, and Debian Developer. She works with non-profit organizations at the intersection of technology, arts and human rights.

No Starch Press: You both work in technology and human rights – and gender equality is one of the most fundamental guarantees of human rights. Given that ICT is an area where women commonly experience discrimination, exclusion and harrassment, what role does internet governance and/or protocol standards play in achieving a more equitable and inclusive global cyberspace?

Mallory Knodel: Gender discrimination is present in internet governance, too. That is to say that, while setting standards and building governance mechanisms presents the opportunity to provide guidance on best practice, efforts to address inequality are undervalued. Rather than getting trapped in the endless loop that starts and ends with the demographics of participant data, there are two things that should be ubiquitously understood by now: 1) inclusion is everyone’s responsibility, and 2) participation is, in some part, related to interest. I hope that my work on human rights and the public interest in standard bodies and internet governance is sufficiently interesting to attract experts who are also feminists, anti-racists, and social justice advocates.

NSP: Your work has brought attention to the theme of the “digital gender divide.” How does gender affect the way women access, use the web, and benefit from internet technology?

MK: The digital gender divide is the result of compounded inequalities that all derive from access to the internet. There is inequality in access to literacy, devices, mobile data, in-home internet subscriptions, information that is censored, paywalled, filtered, and blocked. On the other hand networked mobile devices can exacerbate stalking, police surveillance, harassment, and economic harms such as theft and private data brokerage. At the same time, the offline world of bookstores, government services and public spaces, is disappearing. For initiatives like e-commerce and remote jobs aimed at women to work, ubiquitous, cheap and quality internet access is a fundamental requirement.

NSP: “Alice & Bob” – fictional characters used in discussions about cryptography to make complex concepts more understandable – have been a popular archetype in CS since the ‘70s. But in How the Internet Really Works, you made a conscious decision not to use the “couple” for explaining cryptographic protocols and systems; instead, Alice talks about these topics with a friendly dragon. What inspired you to do this, and what was your intent by recasting “Bob”?

MK: I credit Ulrike with the creative side to our book. She was able to bring to life the everyday objects, characters and mythologies from technology and retell them through her brilliant illustrations of reimagined and more contemporary archetypes.

Ulrike Uhlig: While making the book, we’d come across a very interesting and well-researched work by Quinn DuPont and Alana Cattapan: “Alice & Bob. A History of The World’s Most Famous Cryptographic Couple.” There we learned, for example, that Eve, the person who listens to, and eventually tampers with Alice and Bob’s conversations has sometimes been depicted as Bob’s rejected ex-wife, and that Alice and Bob are not only longer names for representing “A” and “B” (in cryptographic transmissions) but we understood there was also an assumption of their role, related to their gender. We found this to be a bit too heteronormative. We want all sorts of people to be able to identify with our characters, and to, sort of, pass the (non-existing but self-imposed) Bechdel test for books.

However, when writing the text for our book, we noticed that there seemed to be one advantage to using gendered characters – it makes it a little bit easier to explain complex systems, because we can use two different pronouns so readers can more easily follow who is doing what. At first, we had the idea of simply inversing the assumption that Bob is a man and Alice is a woman, and wanted to call those characters “Aob and Blice.” Later we had the idea that Alice could just be talking to her friends, Catnip and Dragon – like, that we accidentally got rid of her assigned role as Bob’s partner. Finally we realized that we didn’t need to use gendered pronouns to make the text easy to understand, we could simply repeat the characters’ names.

Actually, creating the characters of our book has been a challenge for similar reasons. While we knew from the start that we wanted the main character to be a cat by the name of Catnip – an acronym for Censorship, Access, Telecommunications, Networks, and Internet Protocols – we initially thought our secondary characters would be the commonly used ones for explaining cryptography. When we did the first sketches though, it became clear that it would be hard to be inclusive and diverse using “human” characters. So we turned to the imaginary animal world to represent Eve, Mallory, and Catnip’s friend, Dragon. There is now only one human character in How the Internet Really Works who has a name: Alice. With the image of Alice, I encoded a bit of ourselves – women in tech – into the book.

NSP: Women were key to the development of computing in its early history. But in the decades since, they’ve been increasingly marginalized throughout the industry. Are there any notable actions being undertaken right now to help solve the persistent problem of gender inequality in tech and governance?

UU: That’s a good question. I have the impression that ever since I started working in tech, this question has been turned into all possible directions, with a bit of change, but not significant enough change that I would call it progress. I personally think that we need to open up the gender inequality discussion and talk about diversity. To me, this means first of all to question ourselves: How do we encode inequality in our systems? How do we (often unconsciously) reproduce patterns of classism, sexism, ableism, racism, and oppression? How are privilege and social reproduction part of our spaces, organizations, perceptions? Those questions are collective ones, not questions that can be solved on an individual level.

We can ask ourselves similar questions about the technologies that we produce. Technologies, such as internet protocols, are inherently political, as they shape how we interact with each other. How do we encode bias and power into those technologies and how can we do it differently? I would even dare to ask: How can we bring empathy into the technologies that we create? To that end, the Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group at the IRTF, that Mallory is a chair of, aims at researching whether standards and protocols can enable, strengthen (or threaten) human rights, and therefore gender diversity.

Using the Raspberry Pi for Educators


Dan Aldred is the author of Raspberry Pi Home Hacks, scheduled for release later this year, and the creator of the TeCoEd website, which contains free resources for teaching computer education. He is a computer science teacher, a freelance resource writer, a hacker, and a champion of the Raspberry Pi. He was kind enough to create this article with advice and tips for educators on using the Raspberry Pi in the classroom.

A Brief History of the Pi

Saturday, March 3rd, 2019 saw the Raspberry Pi’s seventh birthday celebrations trending on Twitter under the hashtag #PiParty. That Saturday marked seven years since the launch of the $35 computer the size of a credit card. To this day, the Raspberry Pi continues to be extremely popular with schools, makers, and tinkerers.

When people first hear about the Pi, they usually ask “How good can it really be? It only costs $35.” In a market saturated with smartphones and tablets that cost upwards of $500, anyone should be forgiven for questioning the performance of such an affordable product. Yet the evolution of the Pi has continued to surprise, from its original launch specs of 700 Mhz and 256MB of RAM to the current specs of 1.4 GHz and 1GB RAM. Impressively, it has kept the original $35 price tag. When was the last time that you purchased a new phone or laptop and paid the same price that it cost seven years prior?

The Pi Zero model, a $5 version of the Pi the size of a stick of chewing gum, is the most impressive iteration yet. The current Pi Zero W, which retails at around $10, is the same physical size but boasts a 1 Ghz processor and 512MB RAM (four times faster than the original Pi). In addition, it has onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which makes it a perfect board for hacks, projects, and builds.

Make Computer Science More Engaging

As an educator and teacher, I have found the Raspberry Pi to be an inspirational, motivational, and transformative tool for learning computer science. I had one student who self-described as dyslexic, “not very good at maths”, and “in need of a strong pair of glasses.” For eight months he attended my Raspberry Pi lunchtime club and was able to learn in such a way that he gained a world of confidence and went on a journey of personal transformation. Now he’s a confident student who enjoys the ‘logic of maths’ and has even developed a program used on the International Space Station.

In most situations, with the right support from teachers, students feel encouraged to try new things, fail, and keep trying. Students tend to feel the most empowered when the learning process happens through fun activities. This is where the Raspberry Pi comes in. Students are not ‘learning to code,’ but learning how to ‘hack Minecraft.’ They aren’t ‘calculating and coding’ a distance sensor but creating a ‘friend/enemy tracker.’ The versatility of the Pi means that projects, content, and theory can be adapted to appeal to a wide range of students, meeting their needs and abilities. Learning is accessible to all.

Easy to Maintain and Cheap to Replace

One frequent concern for teachers is, what happens if I’m using a Pi and the software fails or the SD card becomes corrupt? With a regular computer, teachers can normally notify tech support and have a malfunctioning computer repaired and returned within days. When using the Pi, malfunctions become a learning opportunity. Problems become chances to show the students how to flash an SD card, install an OS, and discuss what an .img file is. The process of setting up the Pi computer takes about 11 minutes and the next time they experience malfunctions, students will be able to fix it themselves by setting it back up again. If time is at a premium, simply keep a spare SD card in your pocket and swap it over, and the Pi can be up and running again in 30 seconds!

With a $35 price tag, lending students a Pi for the weekend is possible. The external engagement is priceless, even if students are just getting extra practice, and replacing a lost unit won’t break the bank.

Turn Theoretical Concepts into Practical Knowledge

The Pi is also a fantastic tool for learning about abstract concepts like networking. School computer networks are usually locked down. Students have no access to practice setting them up or configuring them. But teachers can easily bring in a few Pi computers and an old home router and get students to set up their own network. Using the OS command line, they can discover their IP address, ping each other, send messages, and even learn how to remotely shutdown another student’s Pi. Install a simple web server like Apache and let students build and host a website that can be accessed from the main school network. MAC addresses are accessible, and you can discuss the concept of spoofing one. Students are often only taught this information in theory. With the Pi in the classroom, they benefit from hands-on experience.

If you find that this approach to networking is still too dry for some of the students, let them set up and host their own Minecraft or Doom server. Once they’re hooked, move on to business and industry applications.

Give Students a Deeper Understanding of the Technology

The Pi grants your students access to the settings, network, GUI, hardware, and so on. This isn’t something to be intimidated by. Students aren’t learning anything if they can simply plug in hardware (a webcam, a flash drive, etc) and have it work perfectly. Modern technology is so user-friendly that any understanding of how the hardware really works is lost. I asked a class how the camera on their phone worked. One enthusiastic student’s hand shot up and they answered, “press the camera app symbol!” Correct, but, what is really happening when you tap the screen? Some argue we don’t need to know. I disagree. An inquisitive mind is healthy.

The computer keyboard is the distant relative of the typewriter, first released in the late 1880s. After over 100 years, remnants of the typewriter are still with us in our everyday keyboards, yet I have met students who don’t know how to type on a keyboard because they have only ever used the touch screens of smartphones and tablets.

With the Pi, students can dig in behind the scenes and see what is actually going on. They can learn to manage, configure, and control software and hardware in an intuitive way. Again, if this is not appropriate for a particular lesson, simply boot the GUI and students have differentiated access.

Acquire Affordable Ready-to-Use Hardware Attachments

One of the best hardware features of the Raspberry Pi is the set of 40 GPIO pins. These pins enable interaction with the environment, inputs, outputs, and lines of code. The Raspberry Pi has a wide range of affordable HATS (Hardware Attached on Top) designed to sit flush on the pins that add additional functionality and hardware to the Pi. One can buy everything from screens, LED matrices, and environment sensors to text scrollers, e ink displays, servo motor boards, and even pianos.

Projects My Students have Created with the Pi

Dan Aldred, computer science educator and author of Raspberry Pi Home Hacks

Lay-Flat Bindings: The What And How

lay-flat binding

You may have noticed that the spines of your No Starch Press books, even the ones you use most, stay free of creases. That’s because we pay extra to have our books bound with premium lay-flat bindings. Most No Starch books (with the exception of hard backs, some older books, and a very few print-on-demand titles) sport this nice little Easter egg.

Lay-flat bindings allow our books to lay open by themselves on a flat surface, making it easy to refer to them while working at a computer. As an added bonus, they keep the spines from developing cracks and creases with frequent use.

Here’s a somewhat technical explanation from our printer about how these special spines are manufactured.


Once a book has been printed and the printed signatures collected, the collated signatures enter our binder and are milled on the spine to prepare them for glue. There is a two-step glue process using PUR (polyurethane reactive) glue, the absolute strongest and most flexible book adhesive made, and EVA (ethylene-vinyl acetate) glue to adhere the covers. The milled signatures go across the PUR glue pot where glue is applied with two rollers:

PUR glue application

A reverse spinner roller then removes the excess glue:

glue leveling

The book then travels between two side glue rollers that apply a bead of EVA glue to the first and last page of the book. EVA glue must be used in this step because is adheres immediately to hold the book together whereas PUR glue must cure for eight hours before it reaches its maximum strength.

The next station is the krash station where the krash paper is applied to the spine of the book to cover the PUR glue film. This creates the gap between the book block and cover that is critical to provide the flexibility and lay-flat properties of this binding style. Finally, a cover is applied which is adhered to the book with the side glue at the front and back corners of the spine.


The books are then inspected for quality issues and shipped off to our distributor, bookstores and of course, to you.

The Very First No Starch Press Book: The Book of SCSI

photo of The Book of SCSI

It’s January of 1995. Boyz II Men have the #1 hit song, Braveheart is in theaters, and Dr. Martens are à la mode. No Starch Press has just published its very first book of all time, The Book of SCSI: A Guide for Adventurers. The guide was a meticulously researched comprehensive SCSI resource that featured no-BS explanations for beginners in plain English as well as deep dives into the technology by experts. While decades out of date, this book set the tone of No Starch books to come with its conversational approach, attention to detail, careful fact checking, and fun aesthetic. Its table of contents included:

  • An intro to the basics of SCSI
  • Instructions on how to add SCSI to your PC
  • An explanation of how the SCSI bus works
  • Overviews of ASPI programming and CAM programming
  • Q&A from major SCSI host adapter manufactures Adaptec, DPT, and Future Domain
  • A directory of 150+ companies that produce SCSI hardware and software
  • A look at SCSI into the future by John Lohmeyer, chairman of the ANSI SCSI-3 Committee and world’s leading SCSI expert
  • Drawings and diagrams of SCSI hardware and systems
  • Tips and troubleshooting help
  • A glossary of terms
  • A comprehensive index

Neither the original, nor its 2nd edition, released in the summer of 2000, are still in print, but both were well-regarded at the time (the original release was even reviewed by PC magazine).

Cheers to the OG No Starch fans who threw on a flannel and headed to the Computers section of their local Waldenbooks to pick up a copy.