This is the start of a series in the style of The Setup but perhaps slightly more technical and focused on members of our community. Please feel free to post followup questions to Kyle here or send question/subject recommendations for future interviews to me privately.

Today’s interview is with Lobsters user Kyle.

0. Introduce yourself, describe what you do for work and how long you’ve been at it.

My name is Kyle, and I am currently a security engineer. I’ve been doing this particular job since mid-2010; before this, I was a sysadmin and student developer. My work now is mostly on hardening our current platform and implementing security features. Sometimes I do code audits or small one-off projects; as the junior member of the team, I don’t do as much architecture as I might like, but I get to sit in on a lot of the discussions.

1. What is your work/computing environment like?

I share an office with a coworker. I’m using a Mac Mini with three monitors, and I have a build box that I have hooked up on a second input on one of the displays (though I rarely use it on the monitor, typically I ssh in). As I work primarily on an embedded Linux platform, the build box has all my cross compile tools. My Mini runs all my VMs, including an OpenBSD VM which is my preferred development environment.

Our team mostly does our work in C and, as a team convention, in Python. Python has one of the best REPLs I’ve used (iPython), is mostly common sense for small projects and prototypes, and is very common as a scripting in a lot of security tools.

Our team is pretty low-key and very independent. We also tend to participate in a lot of capture the flag games.

At home, I do a lot of stuff playing with ARM and random other projects. I have a Macbook Pro that I use occasionally for development work, and use it a lot for media and any sort of office-related stuff I might need to do. I also have a Lenovo T410 that serves as a Linux cross-compile build server for my ARM projects, and an x230 that is my main laptop. I also have a CR48 that I use for CTFs, and I just picked up an ARM Series 3 Chromebook running Linux that I use for taskwarrior, email, and a highly portable development environment with a long battery life. I’ve got various ARM boards for various projects, including some Beagleboard xMs, a Beaglebone, an ODroid, and a Bug.

2. What software are you most often using?

I use spectrwm by conformal as my window manager on both Linux and OpenBSD; on the OS X machines I use the default desktop (although I am working on getting spectrwm set up there as well). My shell is zsh, which I almost always use in conjunction with the tmux terminal multiplexer. It’s not uncommon to have five or more tmux sessions with numerous windows open (it was often joked in university that I only ran X to have four terminals open side by side). I use vim as my primary editor, primarily via the graphical version because I love having tabs. However, I also use emacs when writing lisp code because of SLIME. For web browsing, I use lynx, links, and xombrero for web browsing, although occasionally I use firefox as well. For reading PDFs, I’ve become a fan of apvlv. I mostly listen to music via cmus; for most network messaging protocols, I use a combination of irssi, bitlbee, and the irssi silc plugin to communicate over IRC, silc, xmpp, and OSCAR / AIM (though that is being slowly deprecated). I run irssi on a tmux session on a prgmr VPS. For email, I use mutt, offlineimap, and msmtp. I use a wiki I wrote for note taking and remembering things.

In the past year, I’ve programmed in C, Go, C++, Javascript, Ruby, Clojure, Common Lisp, Python, Forth, and OCAML. I prefer C, Go and Common Lisp, though Python isn’t too bad, and I’m not a huge fan of Ruby or Javascript. I liked Clojure, except that I really don’t like Java or the JVM, and dealing with Java interop and JVM stack traces for a lot of things killed my interest in the language. As C is my primary language, my .vimrc is set up for C development, and is adapted from the one on the Conformal wiki. I also use cscope and valgrind, with CUnit for unit testing, and a couple of static analysis tools: clang’s static analyzer, rats (the rough auditing tool for security), and split.

3. What’s an interesting project you’ve been working on recently?

I’ve been tinkering about with a 3D printer lately — it’s not fully operational yet, but it should be soon. I think it will be an indispensable part of any embedded work: the ability to prototype and print new designs quickly (even something like a case for a car computer project I have on the back burner or the mounts for the cameras I’m using in the same project) saves a lot of time and money. There is a somewhat steep up-front cost, but that pays for itself over time. Also, watching the motors rolling is pretty cool.

4. What is something new you’ve used or integrated into your work that has made a positive impact?

I’ve had a hard time settling on a good setup that I like, which is probably why I have so much kit. I’ve rather liked using a netbook for keeping my mutt and task warrior on without worry about syncing it. The ARM chromebook has great battery life and is extremely portable, so that has helped me out a lot. I have been taking it almost everywhere, along with my iPad which I keep my books on.

Also, I know emacs isn’t terribly popular, but having been exposed to has opened my eyes to how useful it is being able to hack every bit of your environment. Of course, at the end of the day you’re still stuck with emacs, but it would be cool to see that level of changeability in vim.

5. You commented on Lobsters that you learned to program on an Apple //; can you expand on your history with computers and programming?

So, I grew up in a family that wasn’t too well off, and we certainly couldn’t afford a computer. When I was about 8, someone gave my family an old Apple //e. At first I just used it for playing games, but I found the manual that came with it — it talked about how to write programs. It was a little over my head at the time, but I held onto it. A few years later, I found a book on programming in BASIC at the library, and started writing pretty simple programs. I think around 2002, I got my first shell account (on SDF), where I was introduced to unix via NetBSD. I scrounged up a 386 about the same time, and found an outdated version of some Red Hat book in the discount section of my local computer shop — the important thing being it had a boot floppy. Having a copy of the Linux source locally was a big boon to my C development, as was getting involved in my high school’s robotics club. Having such learned to program on such resource-constrained systems was definitely beneficial in forcing me to learn how to write clean, efficient code. This is why I think having some of the current generation of embedded ARM devices (ex. the Raspberry Pi and the Beaglebone) as a learning platform is a great idea; furthermore, I think it will open up a lot more possibilities because it’s far easier to connect something like a Raspberry Pi to reality (using it for a home automation system, for example) than it was the traditional desktop.

Thanks, Kyle.