Category: How to

BSides SF 2023: No Adversaries: Getting Users on Your Side for Tough Transformations

This is the blog post version of my talk with Amy Martin, Project Manager, SF Digital Services, on April 22, 2023, at BSides San Francisco. Video to come. Slides are here.

Every security initiative has two sides. One is purely technical: we need to prevent abusive emails from getting into company inboxes with a product, or we need a code scanner built into CI/CD to look for common insecure patterns in new pull requests. All of these, even those that seem purely like a matter of automation once they’re set up, also have a second side: the people involved.

We’ve both dealt with the human side of implementing security-related processes. Breanne has grappled with it as a site reliability engineer working to refine IAM roles and as a security engineer creating and refining processes around evaluating and approving Chrome extensions and GitHub Actions. Amy has encountered it while pushing technical advances needed to get ahead of software EOL dates and standardize CMS usage among teams who depended on stability to do their jobs. Both of us have learned the value of creating change through policy and process without making everyone hate you.

To that end, we’re using the term users a little differently than usual. Often, this refers to end users, people using your company’s product, the public, or anyone on the outside who needs what we create. What we’re discussing here certainly affects them too, but our focus here is on internal users: partners within our organization, people who depend on our work to get their work done, and people who need to buy into what we’re doing in order to make a better, more secure experience for them and everyone else. Without them, no security transformation will ever truly work.

Two failures, and hope

In January 2022, Amy left her public library job and joined the Delivery team at San Francisco Digital Services. They needed to move about 80 websites off their Drupal 7 platform and onto SF.gov, the City’s unified and accessible website, in advance of the planned end of life of Drupal 7. That was meant to be in November 2022 and did not happen, but that’s another story.

When Amy started at Digital Services in January, about a third of these departments didn’t know yet that they had to move their website by November, and many of them liked their current, government-speak oriented websites just fine. SF.gov is built for usability and accessibility, and plain language is key—not government speak. Every site they moved required content redesign, and Department staff had to be trained to do the work

How can government Digital Service staff convince civil servants and other agencies to embrace digital transformation in the face of a big unwanted project?

The short answer is that they only did part of that. They moved the websites before their deadline, and they got people started on building user-centered websites and writing in plain language. However, most did not continue that work. Some of them even got rid of the content that we made for them and pasted their old content back in.

Although they met our goal of moving the websites by the deadline, they found that they had fallen short of setting government agencies up for future success with user-centered websites

Breanne’s story is from a few jobs ago, before security engineering, when she was an SRE with an interest in security. The company saw its first rash of phishing attempts: texts and emails posing as executive staff, asking for sadly normal things: Google Play gift cards and other easily sold gift cards, urging the recipients to please move quickly, because the gift cards were needed now now now.

Breanne and a colleague teamed up to write both a presentation and written training to let people know what these attempts looked like and to establish company norms around communication so that it would be clearer to everyone what legitimate company communication looked like.

The company had fewer than 100 people then, so it made more sense to write a single version of the training that would serve both the engineering department and other staff, including sales and marketing. The distinction here is less to do with who is or isn’t “technical” and whose jobs depend on answering unknown numbers and replying to texts and emails from strangers.

How could two engineers write a workable, concise anti-phishing guide for everyone? How can it go wrong? In our case: not everyone is experienced at writing precise, well-grounded documentation about a complex subject for a varied audience. In our case, they got the job done, but they bumped into some of the limitations of trying to write something about a very specific topic that’s meant to be for everyone.

How can a project’s start doom it?

It’s good to start as you mean to end, which means that thinking of what makes a project like this successful from the start goes a long way toward ensuring its success. So what gets baked into a project plan that can doom it to failure?

Maybe your planning doesn’t entirely account for reality. Maybe your engagement doesn’t account for the real needs limitations and motivations of your users
Or maybe it’s meteor from space or other things outside our control. (This probably felt way less possible before March 2020. Now it’s a pretty good idea to write “large scale crisis” into every risk plan.)

We can’t control everything, but we can control some things. What can we do?

Remember that your partners are users too. Keeping this in mind prevents a lot of issues. Like with end users, it’s worth your time to get to know your internal users’ motivations, limitations, and wants, as well as their hard NOs: things they absolutely will not tolerate.

Seek the similarities. See what behaviors, preferences, and common experiences make groups of users start to cohere in your interactions with them. If your team is having trouble wrapping their heads around this, consider using a lightweight version of personas. Rather than the more involved versions used in marketing and UX, we don’t need to know anyone’s educational level, income, or other demographic information, though it’s not unlikely that some of these divisions will fall neatly between job titles or departments. Instead, look at what’s going to affect your plans:

  • What tools are they familiar with? What tools that you’re asking them to use might they not have encountered before?
  • Do they work with security a little or often? If they hear from security via a direct message or an email, will their first thought be that they’re in trouble?
  • Are they amenable to change or resistant? If they’re resistant, why? (This is a really important question to answer.)
  • What motivates them? What’s their definition of professional success?

Avoid stereotypes or unhelpful guesses. Making them too artificial or overly specific is also more likely to harm than help. If it’s just you and a colleague working on this project, it can be plenty to discuss the groups you’re seeing form and plan based on that. However, if you’re doing a longer project or perhaps a larger body of work, you may wish to write them down to share, shape, and reference.

Encountering resistance? Slow down. When you’re starting to roll out your initiative, you may encounter resistance. If the resistance is starting to threaten the velocity or the success of what you’re trying to do, tap the brake and regroup. Form a new hypothesis or think of another strategy—and then seek feedback from the group that wasn’t feeling served before. This is extremely important to do, because we can’t afford to guess in these situations. Fortunately, when you deputize people, they often want to step up and help. If I think someone will be reluctant, I tell them that they hold a key to my success that I can’t under any circumstances produce myself. It’s important to mean this when you say it, but fortunately, it’s completely true, so that shouldn’t be hard.

Make it easy for people to do what you want. Breanne talked about this in her BSides SF talk on documentation last year. Some of the same tactics apply here too: bribery is a legitimate option to overcome some objects. Everyone likes stickers and snacks. However, we can do a little better than that too.

Don’t make users wade through extra reading, video, or other hurdles to do the important thing. Make what you need them to do succinct, clear, and as easy to do as possible. Clear instructions help a lot, as do easy contacts to ask for help. Have the critical stuff up front if you’re asking people to take in information. Executive summaries, a block of text or page or two at the front of a longer document, make sure that busy people have an easier time learning what they need. In longer trainings, the occasional tl;dr block can let people with different attention spans hopscotch through without missing the critical stuff.

This is also a great time to think again of accessibility. (Although it’s always a great time to think about accessibility.) It’s the right thing to do and often legally mandated, but it has one more useful effect, which is that it makes it easier to reach different kinds of learners too. Breanne can hear a video but vastly prefers reading, so a video with transcription reaches those with hearing difficulties as well as those who just like reading, those who can’t turn the sound on, and those who just need to CMD-F or CTRL-F to find the one detail they need to do their job.

This is also a good time for another look back, because history can teach us something. Previous efforts may not be perfect, but they may contain practices and approaches that people are already used to, which means they won’t have to do extra work to learn what you’re doing. It may serve your project well to add additional steps and methods of outreach, but if part of the old approach is getting you a good amount of the way there, it’s likely worth keeping. Security doesn’t have the luxury of perfection a lot of the time, but we can do an 80 percent job in several different ways and achieve something closer to it than we would otherwise.

When you’re asking about the history of projects at your organization, make it clear that you actually want to hear real opinions and that there won’t be retaliation or sore feelings if someone confesses a negative opinion about something that came before.

If all else fails, come back to bribery: security skills look good on resumes, even if the person doesn’t work in security. Try getting people on your side to help them master something important or lucrative. This creates allies.

Okay, but why do we need to think about this at all?

Why do we need to think about this? Aren’t people used to security initiatives and communication around them being subpar or even extremely disruptive? Security is important, and shouldn’t that be enough?

Yes, but—people are part of the system too, and if you’re looking to change the system in an effective and lasting way, you need to work the people part of it too. Both people and the non-people part of systems work better if you give them what they need.

People will not adopt the changes you recommend if you don’t make it easy, explain it well, and make the preferred behavior the easy path. Technical motivations have human implications. It’s just true, and until we reach the robot-controlled singularity, this is just how it’s going to be. We have to adapt.

No matter how brilliant your new security solution, clever process, or other big idea is, it will not work as well as you want it to unless people are on your side. Worse still, you might get a false sense of success as people initially go through the motions of doing what you wanted… only to revert to old habits the next time work gets stressful. We’re looking for something more robust than superficial change.

Once more: how do projects fail?

Projects fail if you don’t get buy-in. This doesn’t need to be unanimous support and a company pep rally celebrating how great your project is. It can be as simple as sending a series of emails ahead of time letting people know what’s coming, when changes will happen, and what they need to do. A little consideration goes a long way.

Projects fail when large, disruptive projects, even ones for the benefit of security, are pushed into being without considering how they affect the people who depend on efficiency or otherwise prefer the previous system for good reason. If people are reluctant, we need to know why and to address that.

Possibly worst of all, projects fail when they’re rotted from the inside by contempt for users and other affected parties by those in power. All of your future efforts will be diminished if the people you’re supposed to be serving can tell you think you’re smarter than them, better than them, or a greater authority on their own lives. People hate this and remember it, and you will face increased friction forever if you get up to this kind of thing. So don’t.

How can we fix this?

Unless you’re Ben Affleck and company, we can’t stop a meteor on a collision course with earth, but there are other levers we can pull to make our projects go smoothly.

Going back to story time: Breanne’s anti-phishing presentation had some things to learn. It couldn’t be too long: people are busy. It needed a short, memorable set of guidelines. It needed to relate causes to effects: “If we don’t present a unified front in not answering phishing texts and looking more carefully at emails, we’ll keep getting hit, and that will have an effect on the business.” It needed to be informed by technical needs but without including too much jargon, because most people who needed anti-phishing guidelines didn’t need to know about how spam emails sneak by Gmail’s spam-targeting AI. Technical curiosity is worth indulging, but it was better as a leave-behind piece for those who want it, leaving the rest of the audience free to go back to their regular work.

Amy’s SF.gov migration is still a work in progress. A lot of their work in 2023 has been around evolving practices and platforms to help their users experience digital transformation. Here are some of their guidelines for that work:

Consider accessibility and cultural differences.
Amy is working on the accessibility of the artifacts she creates and becoming more flexible with the formats and platforms she puts them into. City government is a Microsoft house, and it’s not her team’s preferred set of tools, but many of their users are wary of anything else or simply aren’t allowed to use other products.

Emphasize common ground.
Amy’s background is outside of tech. When she talks with users, she leads with her government background, which allows her to show users their similarities. She makes it a point to visibly not understand things and ask questions, to normalize those behaviors to make others more comfortable.

Say things the easy way.
On SF.gov, they write in plain language, but it can be hard to remember to do that with their users too. If what you need to say is written down, put it into hemingwayapp.com and try to lower the reading level using their suggestions.

Avoid tech jargon and business jargon.
When you need to introduce a technical term, level-set by saying “do you already know the word ____?” Give them a chance to say yes or no, then explain it if they don’t.

Use nonjudgmental language.
Rather than calling something “bad” or another derogatory word, explain the pros and cons. Try to be precise about what you’re pointing out so that you are not expressing judgment. That goes tenfold for anything that your user currently uses or wants.

Speak at a comfortable pace for your audience.
Watch for facial expressions that look worried, like wrinkled foreheads: that could mean people are concentrating hard to keep up with you.

Maintain neutral facial expressions.
Amy does not laugh and does not smile when people ask tech questions. Every question is valid, and every question, especially a very basic or exceptionally strange question, gives you information about what that person needs to know from you.

We sometimes think a smile will be reassuring, but consider that even a reassuring smile can convey “I know the answer and you do not”. As we mentioned earlier, you do not want to give even the appearance of thinking of yourself as smarter than the other person, because that is extremely sensitive and it will be clocked.

Listen actively.
Repeat back what you’re hearing. Paraphrase, but not with tech jargon, because that will sound like you’re correcting them.

Celebrate mastery.
The first time Amy ever felt confident, good, and proud when using a tech tool was in an intermediate Excel class. Amy is not an Excel master, but “confident, good, and proud” is the feeling of mastery. When Amy sees a user experiencing a feeling of mastery, she parties with them, no matter how small a thing it’s for. Amy saw a user feeling mastery because she learned the keyboard shortcut for paste. They celebrated her success as a team, and they’re still a team.

Question your assumptions about your users.
A little humility truly does go a long way. When you don’t understand what your users are doing or why they want what they want, you could try the five whys, because asking why five times can lead you to the real problem.
Example: a tech product that library bought, failed to adopt, and canceled within a year.

  • Why did we fail to adopt the product? Staff never made it part of their workflow.
  • Why was that? They had trouble training and onboarding everyone.
  • Why was that? Rolling out new software to busy front-line staff is very hard, and they did not set aside enough of everyone’s time to make the training stick.
  • Why was that? The software wasn’t seen as enough of a priority to take people away from public service.
  • And why was that? Well, one person in leadership signed a contract for the software despite every other person saying it wasn’t a good fit for the library.

Answer: lack of buy-in.

Try it out and find a version of it that works for you. Sometimes it’s a good tool to use when you find yourself feeling annoyed by the users you’re meant to be serving.

Ask like a librarian: use reference interviews.
Amy was a librarian for 17 years and wants to teach you about reference interviews. When you go to a library and say can you help me find a book, that is the beginning of your reference interview. In this interaction, a trained librarian is assessing:

  • The words you chose
  • Whether there was hesitation in your voice
  • Your body language
  • Tone
  • The way you approached them
  • What else you are holding in your hands 
  • And more

A secret of reference interviews: the cover isn’t blue. Amy has been surprised, in the tech world, by how literally people take requests from users. There’s a librarian adage about “the book with the blue cover.” Asking for things inaccurately is expected behavior. Not because people are lying or not smart, but because this is the way human brains work: imprecisely. 

A good reference interview helps a person form their question. Try tangential lines of questioning. When you’re looking for the book with the blue cover, it’s tempting to keep asking about the cover. Is there a picture? Light blue or dark blue? 

Don’t bother. The cover is irrelevant. 

Ask questions about something else. When did you read the book? In the 70s? Last year? Was it a book you were assigned in school? Did you get it at a Scholastic book fair? Was the main character an animal or a person? Amy uses a mix of broad and specific questions to try to snag on some detail that triggers a new, meaningful memory. The same technique can work for zeroing in on product requirements. 

Learn user vocabulary and motivations.
Every question is valid. A question might sound silly to you, but it is not silly to the person asking. If you are a knowledge authority figure, chances are they had to screw up their courage to ask you.


Keep a neutral facial expression.
We won’t tell you not to smile, but remember that a smile can read as condescending.

Get to know their vocabulary, and use it.
People often adapt their language in ways they assume make sense to us when they ask questions. They use vocabulary they’ve heard people in our position use. They focus on a detail that’s related to what they want because they associate that detail with techy people.

A common example of this in tech is a user who insists on a particular feature, but has an inaccurate understanding of what it does. They know what outcome they want, but ask for a thing that won’t get them that outcome. Why? Because they are trying to communicate the outcome to you in what they assume is your language. Repeating what users said and paraphrasing, in addition to being good active listening, gives them a chance to edit and refine their ask. Listen to the vocabulary your partners use and use it too.

Be wary of contempt.
If you work with anyone who expresses contempt for your user, be very wary of them. All users are beautiful, but some are harder to reach. If you don’t like working with users and find yourself disdainful of their needs, consider that in your career path. You have more than one kind of user and they are all important.

Tie directives to outcomes your users value.
They may not be the same outcomes you value! Find common fears and desires among the users you’re meant to serve and appeal to them, ideally leaning more on the desires than the fears. It’s better to only reference the scarier things (“If we don’t complete this initiative, we’ll have our government certification pulled, and we will all be unemployed”) only with people who know you well. Instead, try invoking more immediate stakes. Breanne likes “I don’t want you to get a phone call at 3 AM if something goes wrong, because everyone understands that.

Takeaways

  • Work to understand actual motivations behind resistance.
  • Learn to speak the user’s language: vocabulary, accessibility, and technological knowledge.
  • No dictates without relating them to your user’s actual needs and priorities.
  • Try reference interview secrets to understand the bigger picture.
  • Helping people to master something important/lucrative will get them on your side.

Further reading

Writing for Work: Team Structure for Great Good

In the past, my posts for various jobs have generally been the result of some curiosity, in the vein of what’s the deal with PATH, the program that formats man pages is HOW old, and what does good password hygiene look like. (Yes, I blogged in my previous life as a content strategist; no, I’m not digging those up right now. Have at it if you want.) My first post for my new job at Nylas (well, newish – I’ve been here almost eight months now) is the result of some longer study, which makes sense. One of the reasons I sought a new job was project longevity and continuity. Working as a consultant exposed me to so many new ideas and situations, but I wanted to see what I’d learn once I got to stay put for a while.

I won’t say every day has been easy, but I will say that I’m really pleased with what I’ve been doing. I get to point at a new program and essentially say “I WANT IT,” and then it’s mine. (It’s helpful when GIMME intersects with your manager’s need to delegate.) Oh, you want Elasticsearch, Breanne? HERE YOU GO. No regrets! I’ve dug deep into the weirdness of AWS IAM, moved a ton of stuff into Terraform and set our style guidelines for what good Terraform looks like, made my first EU AWS resources, learned some Ansible, got to apply Python to systems management with Boto, weirded out with Bash, and gotten better acquainted with monitoring. I’m chuffed.

A thing I gave the team in return is structure. In my work post, for obvious reasons, I didn’t go deeply into what I had previously learned that was useful here. However… what I’d previously learned was incredibly useful here. I became fatigued from new situation after new situation, but it was incredibly gratifying to get to use those same skills to make a comfortable, regular set of meetings and other expectations that I actually got to benefit from in the long term. It felt good to start good sprint planning, standups, and retros for clients, but it felt amazing to make them with myself and my ongoing teammates as the beneficiaries of this stuff. And do you know, I was pretty good at it after going through the process several times before. Fortunately, I worked with people who trusted me – and, perhaps even more important, made it clear that this was not exclusively my job and would not be solely my responsibility as time marched on. It is not extremely surprising, I think, that after setting all of this up and spreading responsibility across the team… I’m backing off the glue work for a bit, because the structure is in place for me to computer more exclusively. I’m very excited.

It also pleases me that this is all essentially another kind of automation. I love automating infra stuff – fully automated deploys and regular checks on systems and updating spreadsheets and all of the boring stuff that computers can do better than we can. What I wanted here was essentially automation in interactions, a regular cadence of events that freed us from having to reinvent structure unnecessarily, so we all had set expectations and were free to focus on the things we actually care about, that do require human interaction and innovation. I’m happy to say that it worked.

I wrote this post in part because I was proud of what I did and wanted to say so publicly. However, I also wrote it because I know the problems I had – meetings without set structure, unclear expectations between teams, irregular schedules that cause more confusion than they cure – are very common, and I hope this post helps even one other person set themselves free from another agendaless meeting, to remember that there’s something better on the other side. I’ll see you there, timer in hand, politely reminding everyone that lunch is soon, and we’d best wrap it up.

Writing for Work: on Passwords and Better Practices

Broken glass pieces sticking out of the stop of a stucco wallI wrote for work! I love writing for work. This time, I got to write the first entry in our security series and talk about sufficiently complex passwords, how to store them, and how to manage them across time and breaches. (Bonus: my predilection for taking travel pictures of forbidding fences and danger signs wound up being really helpful in our quest to avoid trite security-themed clip art.)

This was an exciting one to write. We’re not a security company (in fact, we are infrastructuralists, in case you had not heard), but good, solid practices, including security in all its forms, do touch our work pretty often. (See: the conversations I have with people who work with my client periodically about how we cannot use AMIs made by outsiders, we cannot use Docker containers not created internally, and we need a really-no-seriously good reason to peer our VPC to theirs.)

However, like lots of people in tech or even tech adjacent, the people we love who aren’t in tech and aren’t so steeped in this stuff ask us for guidance in how to be safer online from a technological standpoint. My password post (tl;dr: get a password manager, change all those reused passwords, repent and sin no more) is the first; we’ll also be covering how vital software updates are, how treacherous email can be, and why ad blockers are good for more than just telling popups to stfu. We’re writing this series to have a good, reliable resource for us and for others called to do Loved One Tech Support so that even those not glued to their laptop for the duration of their professional lives can adopt good practices and not be totally hosed the next time some major company’s store of usernames and passwords gets breached.

Advice for Women Thinking of Going to DEF CON (Yes, Really)

Via Flickr

I decided to go to DEF CON last year on a lark. I went to a WISP lockpicking event last June with a friend and coworker, who informed me that she was considering going, and oh, hey, did I want to come with? I’d heard of it before, but not in detail and not quite in the right context to make it sound like something I’d want to attempt. This time landed differently, though. (I blame having recently learned to use a handcuff shim.) I spent the evening after the event looking up flights to Vegas, hotels, and other research that suggested this was not a financially responsible move and not really very good timing either. Still, it stuck in my head, and I had to pull myself away from Kayak and its ilk and make myself go to bed later than was ideal.*

The next day, I mentioned it to a different coworker, who has a good balance of fun and financial responsibility. Since we were less than a month out from the event and I had neither transportation nor a place to stay, I expected her to talk me down and suggest that I try next year.

Instead, she told me she was going, and did I want to share a room? And that was phase one done – resolve achieved, bed secured, posse acquired, and only the small matter of airfare and time off to deal with. Fine fine.

Phase two was one I’ll call, “Oh, you’re doing to DEF CON? That’s… interesting.” This phase happened after reservations were in place, when I told friends and colleagues in tech what I was planning. The reactions tended to be similar: a mix of understanding why I’d consider doing such a thing and affectionate concern based on knowledge or experience of some shitty person or people in their past. These reactions came in a few flavors:

  • I went a few times but then had to stop [insert ominous look here]
  • I wouldn’t go there if you paid me, not any amount
  • I hope you enjoy yourself, but be careful (and you’re not going alone, right?)
  • You are not allowed to take any work assets with you on this trip

(This last one came from one of our bosses. We complied.)

Research nerd that I am, I looked up “How to DEF CON” but largely found articles aimed at, well, stinky boys. (#NotAllStinkyBoys, I know, but you should talk to other, more prominent bloggers about that if you want to shift those optics.) I did come away with some good, more general advice, most of which echoed what had been said to me already. Things like:

  • Turn off the wifi on your phone
  • Probably just keep your phone on airplane mode when you’re in the thick of things
  • Maybe keep it in a faraday bag, while you’re at it, come to that, and still wipe and restore it when you get home, because you never know
  • Just leave it at home, assuming home is in another state
  • Trust no ATM in proximity to the conference (though casino floor ones might be ok, heavily monitored as they are – but if you can get by without, do that)
  • Don’t bring your laptop; bring a burner if really must
  • Probably bring a burner phone too, really
  • Bring enough cash to exist on, if you can, and maybe don’t muck around with credit or debit cards (though opt for credit if you must, because they have fraud protection)
  • It’s more about people than the sessions
  • Go to parties and side events and games and whatever else crosses your radar. Here’s a good place to start getting a sense of what’s possible for the 2017 one.

All good and well, sure. What I didn’t find was advice to match the portents from friends based specifically on my situation as a woman heading to DEF CON. So, in the way of the semi-reformed content marketer that I am, I decided to put together my own resource. So, here you go: how I, a woman, an engineer, and a hard introvert with a low tolerance for dickheads, recommend approaching DEF CON.

Packing for DEF CON

The Las Vegas setting of DEF CON means that you’ll be walking between ovens and refrigerators most of the time. This is a great recipe for feeling a little uncomfortable and a little gross during most of your waking hours, but you can plan around this.

For general packing, here’s what I recommend.

  • Bring twice as many pairs of underwear as the number of days that you’re staying. Even when it isn’t warm in those big event spaces, it’s still close; you will appreciate the option to swap out layers without taking anxious inventory as you near the end of your trip.
  • Wear clothes that breathe. Beyond that, of course, wear what you want. Some women find it useful to go stealth in a hoodie and jeans; I found it oddly fun to be as dressy there as I sometimes am in normal life – but I also appreciated having options depending on the feeling of the day. Decide what will be more likely to make you feel comfortable in the context of a very busy, very distinctive conference, and you’ll be fine.
  • Excedrin. I’m headache-prone, so that’s a given for me.
  • Sleeping pills, if you roll that way. I like an OTC sleeping pill when I’m not sleeping at home. This last year, I, a person who lives alone for sanity-keeping purposes, shared a hotel room with three other people. It was worth cutting off any booze around ten so I could safely tranq myself to sleep and be both smart and sociable the next day.
  • And for your day-to-day pack, I suggest a not-small water bottle (at least 750ml), more snacks than you think you’ll really need, a hand fan, and a notebook and pens. You will learn about all sorts of weird shit, plus Twitter handles to follow, sites to look up, rad repos, and talks of yore. Have an analog way to record them for later.

Planning And Attending

Secure your tech.

See the earlier suggestion about burner laptops and/or phones and/or faraday containment devices. I learned while I was there that Bally’s told their entire staff to keep their phones off while working that weekend. I originally went on airplane mode for the first couple of days until coordinating with my friends got very annoying; then I used cell data only. Things went fine, but I plan to get a burner in place for this year. Figure that you’re going to be going fairly analog in the middle of a tech-centered conference, plan accordingly, and you’ll be fine.

An exception is if you want to participate in a CTF event or a tutorial – you’ll want a proper laptop for that kind of thing. Consider a Chromebook with Kali with no stored login information, with a plan to wipe it when you get home. And if you’re not sure of what a CTF is or are feeling a little daunted, this writeup of a rad engineer’s first one is pretty exciting.

If you do decide to bring a laptop, you can take your chances with official conference internet. Bear in mind that you need to set it up beforehand; go here for more details.

Walk fast, or make plans based on geography rather than strictly interest.

I don’t know how the rest of you manage to get to the talks you want, if they’re far away from each other. I sped across the Bally’s gaming floor over and over, from front to back, from side to side, from Vegas to Paris and back, going from a far-off upstairs meeting room to an upper-floor set of executive suites to a trio of enormous function rooms off of hallways made to look like a more restrained Versailles. I was a little more session-motivated than most people seemed to be (including the friends I traveled with), but the time between sessions made that difficult. If I didn’t walk fast and didn’t enjoy walking fast, I would’ve seen far fewer things.

Figure out where the water fountains are.

And keep that big-ass water bottle full. Plan on refilling it every couple of sessions. I’m not sure what it is about being around so many other people in close proximity that brings biological needs so much to the forefront, but it does. Routine dips in hydration or blood sugar become so much more pressing, even while surrounded by water fountains and stores only too eager to sell you supplies. Plan ahead, and your brain will work better for you.

If a party sounds cool, just sign up.

Lots of companies and villages and groups have parties, minicons, and other events. If you happen upon one that sounds good, and they request an RSVP, just do it (unless it’s a tutorial with a small capacity – then be cool, please). Everyone is dashing between five things most of the time while they’re there; might as well ensure your name is on the list.

Research sessions ahead of time; do multiple-choice selections in the moment.

(If you care a lot about sessions, of course.) To ensure you see more of what you want to see (because you will not see it all), I’d suggest culling possibilities ahead of time. I liked the app for this, as it shows you everything across the villages and the main con itself, and it lets you add competing sessions to your schedule for easy picking. There’s also the physical book you get when you check in – and the conference website, of course. Note everything that sounds interesting. Particularly if you’re new, you’ll probably learn something regardless of what you select.

However, let the final selection come in the moment, when you’re on one side of the conference space and you have to choose between staying put and sprinting across a casino floor; when it’s 20 floors up, and the lone functioning elevator is not behaving; when the line for a session is full 30 minutes before the doors open. Give yourself a few options for each timeslot and then let the conditions of the moment dictate what you actually try to do.

My favorite sessions fell into a few categories:

  • Social engineering
  • How to break shit (the Bluetooth lock session was a highlight)
  • Fun with Python
  • Feds answer questions
  • Where current events and infosec meet (like the one where a nice Danish man talked about the Ashley Madison hack and online information hygiene)
  • Mostly we’re fucked (that is, the intersection of “how to break shit” and IoT things)

I’ll likely stick to those same themes this year, but I’ll try to go outside of them too.

Be open to new things.

Skills, smells, weird social skills and experiences. There aren’t a lot of spaces like this on earth, so roll with it when it makes sense. You can be in predictable company later.

This was a big part of what friends in the know warned me about. It seems like everyone who’s gone enough times has a story of someone acting like a most memorable piece of shit. I had a couple brushes with annoying sexist nonsense, but clearly not enough to dissuade me to come again this year. (My current prediction is that I’ll get to come three times before something really obnoxious happens, enough to make me say the hell with it and stick to B-Sides, but I look forward to being proven wrong.) However, fucked-up things, of course, aren’t necessarily tied to gender. A male colleague of mine stopped going around DEF CON 12 when he saw someone dancing drunkenly with a live firearm at a party. We all have our limits.

Don’t go to pool parties.

(This is clearly highly subjective, and the friends I went with may likely disagree, but.) Not all dudes (#NotAllDudes) werewolf out at these very guy-centered events with bars, but enough do that I don’t find it worth it when I could be doing anything else. If you also have a certain ungenerous tolerance for risk, go literally anywhere else, because if that place sucks, you can leave much more easily than if you’re in a wet swimsuit. My tolerance for uncertain behavior in social situations out of my control has a pretty hard limit. This is outside of it. You can, of course, decide based on your own “hell no” scale.

If you can go stealth, eavesdrop on non-conference folks.

There are people – unfortunate people, innocent people, sweet summer children – who planned their Vegas escape not knowing what they’d be encountering. They thought they were there to see Cirque and eat crab legs, and they ended up navigating hordes of goons for 14 hours a day. They are hilarious and wonderful. I recommend lingering by customer service or at the buffet to overhear what you can. I felt considerably more badass after overhearing a few minutes of speculation of just what the hell was going on with all the people with skull badges between a clerk and a customer at the Paris casino loyalty club desk.

Seriously, stretch.

Even (especially) if you find yourself in the same room for several sessions in a row. Get up and stretch, especially your quads. You’ll have several days of this. Take care of yourself.

Shopping

It’s worth it to stop by the vendors. The stuff for sale last year typically fell into one of three categories: learning, mayhem, and novelty t-shirts. The first two are pretty alluring to me, and I saw things for sale that one doesn’t typically see anywhere else. It’s worth budgeting for, ideally in cash.

My souvenirs from last year included a pen testing book from No Starch, a couple handcuff shims (you never know), two clear padlocks, and a set of lockpicks for the friend who watched my cats while I was gone. I was pretty satisfied with this, and this year I’ll probably budget for an Ubertooth or something else similarly fun and shiny.

It’s normal, with conferences, to be tempted to wait until the last day to go buy things to try to catch discounts, but at DEF CON, stuff will sell out. If there’s something you really want (and really don’t want to buy online with a credit card), just get it the first day. Nothing is overpriced if you’re satisfied with what you bought and happy with the experience.

One exception is if you wear a smaller t-shirt size. Sizes L and bigger sell out pretty fast, so if you wear one of those: buy sooner. If you’re more of a small or medium: late Saturday or anytime Sunday is a fine time to get your smaller DEF CON shirt with a little break in price.

What I’ll Do Differently This Year

I was pretty satisfied with how last year went, particularly considering the warnings I got. That said, there are a few things I’ll keep in mind when planning my 2017 trip.

Get there on Wednesday night.

Last year, my friends and I used the typical metric of nonprofessional, more culture-centered conferences and planned to arrive on day two. This meant we had access to zero workshops, missed a bunch of DEF CON 101 stuff, and spent more than a day with the flimsy temp badges they give out once the rad ones are gone. It was not an unreasonable approach, but it was wrong and a bit of a bummer. This time, we’re getting in on Wednesday night.

Figure out parties and villages to visit ahead of time.

Last year, though I was told about this, I didn’t quite get how much of DEF CON is in the side events. Deep down, I am basically Hermione, so the idea of paying for a conference and not going to as much of its official programming as I reasonably could just did not compute. This time, I’m going to ask my friends to help me be more fun than comes naturally to me sometimes.

Tell people who say stupid things to fuck off.

I’m really only thinking of a single situation here, but I was still in “I’m new, I’m a guest in this place and trying to learn it” mode, so I didn’t say anything, and clearly it still bothers me. So: I’ll say something next time. If someone else feels safe to be a little obnoxious, I’ll remind myself that I have the privilege to risk the same. There were 22,000 people there last year. I can tell someone acting like an ass to get the hell away from me, and I’ll go try my luck with the other 21,999.

What I’ll Repeat

Roll with a group of women.

Our lady quad occasionally picked up other lone women like an awesome Katamari, and it was a great way to meet interesting people. It was easier to take chances and drift away for a few hours because I knew I could rejoin my group of understanding friendlies whenever I needed to. (If you’re a woman going solo to DEF CON, feel free to say hello. We would love to meet you.)

Revel in the very short women’s bathroom lines, because when do I ever get to experience that otherwise. (Infosec and infosec-adjacent conferences, that’s when. I don’t like what it’s a symptom of, but I’ll take a very small bit of ease in the meantime.)

Stay nearby, but not in the conference hotel itself.

I liked being able to use wifi when I tucked in for the night (though there are reasonable arguments that even this is not a great move), and there was something calming about leaving the middle of the action and being able to turn off my situational wariness.

In Conclusion

I’m an engineer with a love of people breaking shit, making shit do what it was not originally intended to do, and smartasses in general. I liked DEF CON. I’m looking forward to it again – enough to deal with Las Vegas in bloody July. However, it’s very much its own weird animal. It’s a self-selected group that’s different than any I’ve ever circulated amongst before. But, like most groups of humans, most people are benign, some are interesting, some are “interesting,” some are lovely, and some are viruses with shoes. I’d say, in going to DEF CON, your chances of having something unpleasantly memorable happen are higher than among the average population, but not so high that it’s worth skipping if you also like the things I listed above.

There are situations, though, that don’t fit neatly into the suggestions and categories I set out above, so I’ll leave you with some miscellaneous observations from my notebook to place you in the setting in a more immediate way.

  • 98.6 degrees in here, and a pervasive recurring smell of farts and accumulated humanity.
  • Opinionated, reality-divorced emitters of skin clouds and biome signature
  • Apparently a room full of dudes will not understand why you shouldn’t text your dick to someone
  • The current version of the US military interrogation manual is online and freely available
  • 3 pm: am mostly sure I am not the source of the back row funk cloud here. 3:30: rest of row left. Less sure, although funk cloud also left, so…
  • Being a woman with a wordsmith background and a tendency to observe behavior may make me an ideal mole-type. Stereotypes help us defend ourselves (or have), but we can still exploit that shit.
  • Social engineering as a woman, at a talk by women, for surprised men

However, I hope, if you’re tempted, you’ll just go for it. Come say hi if you do. And, while you’re there, try to sleep enough, don’t get too fucked up and hungover, and keep your water bottle full. And, with luck, I won’t be back here in August or in another year or two, writing about how all the warnings were right. With luck, you’ll have a good time too, if you decide to go for it.

A Little More Information, if You Want It

If you’re still figuring out how to do this, here are some more resources for you.

<PennsylforniaGeek/>: The Road to DEFCON

This is the detailed post I was looking for last year. You get to have it, at least.

Reddit: a good breakdown of likely costs for the whole event

There are ways around some of these things, of course. I used Southwest points for my flight this year and am splitting a nearby Airbnb with friends, so we have more room for less money. Last year, I tried to have one good, robust meal out per day so that I wouldn’t feel too messed up from Clif bars and breakfast buffets. Figure out what you need to feel like a functioning human; budget for that. Find a roommate online if you’re broke and brave. There’s a good chance you can make this work, if you’re willing to hustle a little. 

An outsider’s view of what all the fuss is about

It gets fucked up sometimes. One of my remarkable bits of good luck is that malignant dudes mostly let me live my life. Other women are not so lucky. This post gives you an idea of what another side of the experience, quite different than mine, can be like. Take care of yourself, please. We need you.

Linked above, but worth repeating: an overview of how wifi works and what a Pineapple is, with a list of event-specific precautions on slide 17.

 

*I like to travel, you see, and I can get very wrapped up in planning it out.

Pipefail Bail: When to Add (or Remove) set -u

The scene: I was going back to a set of 18-month-old Packer files to add set -eux -o pipefail to each file in the build. (If you’re not familiar with this command and its uses, here’s where I learned about it. Highly recommended.) I’d recently had a two-day time sink, wherein I couldn’t get LDAP access to work on our CI/CD, and eventually I found that the shell script that adds our LDAP certs had coughed and died midway through without Packer erroring out and letting me know that something was wrong. LDAP failure is a pretty common sign that something is wrong with our CI/CD, but in the past it’s been due to more exotic problems than Packer petering out. Pipefail isn’t necessarily the right tool for every job, but I wanted to spare my future self these issues, where VERY SIGNIFICANT PROBLEMS might otherwise be buried in a billion screens of Packer output.

(Yes, I’ll still look at the credentials folder first next time.)

That was how I learned that Packer scripts can fail, but the build can still complete. This surprised me, considering how many failed builds I experienced when I was first working with Packer. So now I’m working through each script, finding quiet problems (such as unnecessary symbolic links being created during the installation of our version of Java) and other issues that perhaps aren’t problems today but may arise like the kraken later to take its accumulated revenge. Like I said, these scripts have been in use for about a year and a half, building AMIs at least once a month. Usually, only the base AMI changes, and the only other alterations have been additions – this version of Ruby that one dev team needs, this package for another group. Beyond that, it’s been pretty steady, which means a fair amount of time has passed since any kind of in-depth review of these files.

Pipefail is a great and rather educational way to work through your scripts, but on a recent day of this little side project, I encountered a surprising problem. In one of the scripts, PATH is augmented, followed by source /etc/bashrc. This is when the file errored out, with a gasp of  amazon-ebs: /etc/bashrc: line 12: PS1: unbound variable.

What in the what?

I did some googling for this unbound variable business, but the results didn’t apply to what I was doing. I wasn’t failing to create $youMessedUp. /etc/bashrc did indeed exist in the Packer Build instance, which I confirmed by, variously, touch /etc/bashrc, ls -a /etc | grep bashrc, and cat /etc/bashrc, at various times in my troubleshooting. The source command was being used correctly. And there were exactly no variables in that script.

Huh.

But /etc/bashrc was a robust file, quite lengthy compared to the most familiar file of its type in my life, the ~/.bashrc on my own machine. There was a lot going on in there… including variables. And because of the kinds of AMIs I use on this project – that is, AMIs built by a different team I have little contact with, issued every month without exhausting notes on what might have changed from the last version – any alteration I might have made that day might be useless or, worse, damaging when applied blindly next month.

Shit.

Beyond that, there was the issue of scope. This pipefail project was supposed to be about controlling my end of things. Faulty machine images and limited control are just part of my job. I’ve dealt with said images, but the dealing is not typically dont in shell scripts. Usually, if it’s something especially sticky, the job becomes one of communication, wherein I document what’s up and reach out to the agency in charge of regular base AMI creation so we can sort things out.

So that resolution and realization was where set +u came in.

I have an ongoing concern that shortcuts that I think are efficient might be unhelpful cheating, especially in this particular phase of my career. I ran my error and my situation by a few more senior engineers at my job. The idea of set +u came up. And said seniors confirmed that this was just wise and not laziness.

So:

set +u

source /etc/bashrc

set -u

That is, repeating the command at the top of the page. +u reverses that initial -u flag, which ends the script when an unbound variable happens. For that one line, only set -ex -o pipefail is in play, minus that situationally unfortunate -u.

This is useful if you have a weird situation like mine, where you need to run bash strict mode most of the time but have a line or a section of a script that deals with a resource that’s out of your control (but which you can still trust). Other times this is useful is if you’re activating a virtualenv in Python. In that case, set -u may be best set aside for that particular endeavor. In short, if your script is opening a big bucket of things out of your control (/etc/bashrc, the contents of an /env/bin/activate folder), and you want to go full set -eux -o pipefail otherwise, pop a little set +u in there.

But, this specific little situation aside, I’ve become a convert for set -eux -o pipefail on my Packer builds for sure and will probably keep the habit when I’m in a situation where I’m using AMIs not made by an outside team. The more you know, right? 

11 Lessons from My First Year in Software Engineering

Paper garlands against a twilit sky

I hit my one-year anniversary as a software engineer in October. It has been, professionally, one of the harder, stranger years of my life, but the challenges generally were exactly what I hoped they would be: complicated, but with clear questions, and answers that were a pleasure to seek. That said, there are a few things I wish I could whisper to my past self, either right when I was starting this job, just as I was starting Hackbright, or a couple of years ago when I wrote my first lines of Python. Here’s a bit of advice to my past self, to anyone who’s considering this journey, and to anyone who’s still fairly new and would like a little reassurance.

1. Everything I heard about learning this is true (or: no, really, just pick a project).

If you want to learn programming, you do need to just pick a project and proceed. I really disliked this advice when I first heard it, because I am all about context, and I couldn’t imagine picking an appropriate challenge without knowing the limits and possibilities out there. And that’s a legitimate concern – it’s crucial to pick the right-sized problem, so far as complexity and the number of tools it will require, if you’re going to learn without getting so frustrated that you quit prematurely. Even so, it’s those raw edges, that unpredictable stuff, that gives you the real learning, that can be the most educational (and most satisfying) to wrap your brain around.

My real, substantial learning on this job began when I was put on a project, which didn’t happen immediately after I was hired. I had learned things before then, self-studying along in the office, but it lived strictly within the realm of the hypothetical (something I consider likelier a limitation of my own beginner state than anything else). Learning within the context of a project can be kind of like memorizing a poem by hearing every fifth word, and out of order and occasionally in a different language to boot. However, what you do learn will be practical and actionable, and – perhaps most valuable of all – will provide the context around what happened and what you need to do. And eventually, you’ll know a lot of it – and be able to intuit or sleuth out the rest.

My suggestion to you: it’s annoying how much it’s true, but I’d suggest just giving in (and finding a good advisor for picking and shaping your project, if you can). Find a practical problem in your own life and decide a way to start addressing it. If you get stuck, it’s a big, generous internet out there, and some of the people in it will even have right answers. 

Bonus suggestion: consider making a command line utility. It has a delightfully low barrier to entry and gives you a great chance to make something useful to you without worrying about deploying or front-end work. If you’re a Python kid like me, start by looking at argparse and then let your imagination run away with you. 

Bonus bonus suggestion: many programming communities now have Slack networks that are open to the public, if you request access. If you know you’re interested in a particular language and want someone to ask questions to, see if there’s an active Slack channel for your area of interest. The availability of DMs and the more regulated, curated nature of most Slack communities can make them friendlier to beginners.

2. Learning is a skill. Learning this is a different skill.

Computer science’s history is relatively short, but it’s some dense archeology, if you’re trying to wrap your head around even the most essential central stuff. Some people get to be immersed in it for four years before they’re thrust into the workplace; the rest of us get to pick up on useful commonality when we start playing with our third programming language. (Though people like Gayle Laakmann MacDowell have said that this is far from an insurmountable hindrance.) The good thing is that each new skill you learn will require slightly less origination and effort and will build slightly more on things you’ve already learned.

However, this growing knowledge will never reach one hundred percent, regardless of your background. If you plan on staying in this field, you have to learn to love at least a little constant disorientation. If you aren’t confused on the regular in your first couple of years in this field, you’re not trying hard enough.

My suggestion to you: learn to love feeling like your feet aren’t quite firmly planted beneath you, because it means you’re in the learning space. Disorientation means you’re surrounded entirely by new things to learn. Eat it up.

3. Any dregs of self-consciousness and admitting ignorance will either go out the window fast – or you will remain bad at this.

My company is largely remote four days a week, and I was, for a time, the only engineer in our central office. This meant that, if I had a problem and my manager wasn’t available, I had to go into a public Slack channel to seek help. This eased in time, mostly as I got to know my coworkers better. But until I got to that point, every question I asked felt like broadcasting my ignorance to the company, who only knew me as the inquisitive little Slack avatar. HEY LOOK AT ME HERE’S THE THING I DON’T KNOW OF THE HOUR.

That is, until I stopped caring because I understood that no one else cares. And beyond that, it’s as true here as in any other field that the best time to ask basic-ass questions is toward the beginning, when they naturally occur, before you start eroding the foundation you’re trying to build. 

My suggestion to you: breathe deep and get over it – or pretend to until it’s true. Admitting you don’t know something is a vital part of being good at this job, because there’s no room to bullshit. Any fudging you do will be revealed later, and most likely at a really annoying (and embarrassing) time.  

4. Useful experience is less about exhaustive knowledge and more about navigating new situations and tech.

Expertise can sometimes be demonstrated by knowing who wrote what language, what the most vital book is about a subject, or the history of the specific design decisions and needs that went into a framework. But this is surface trivia, and what’s most important (to me, so far) is context and the experience that provides it. It’s still the thing I crave most often, when I find myself in those disorienting moments where I don’t know the answer and am not even entirely certain of the right question.

It can be extra frustrating because I don’t just want to know how something works. I also want to know the situations where considering that thing as a solution on a project is appropriate, what would inform that recommendation, and what you heard about its past releases and future plans that might make everything terrible in six months.

I felt this basically constantly at the beginning and now, fourteen months in, I still feel this way pretty often. I choose to view it as still finding this field incredibly interesting. I can’t imagine what being bored or plateauing would look like in this job because there is always, always more stuff. And, after a while, you’ll have experienced enough of it that you’ll know better how to navigate the next big thing. 

My suggestion to you: hang in there, mostly. And just be willing to try things, volunteer for new projects, and get all of the experience you can – within reason.

5. My sense of curiosity is a valuable job qualification.

I have, in the past, annoyed lesser bosses by asking why. When I asked, I wasn’t questioning their judgment – or not usually, anyway. What I needed was to understand what went into a given decision, so that I could make my own decisions to support it appropriately. (Yes, it does make sense that I have user research in my background too.)

This quality is really useful in this job – in fact, in a well-functioning environment, I’d call it essential. It’s particularly so when you do consulting for clients, as my company does. Sometimes we serve them better not by doing exactly as they request but by asking why enough (and politely enough) to find out what it is they really want. From there, good work actually gets done.

My suggestion to you: your beginner enthusiasm and curiosity are valuable tools. When you don’t take anything for granted, you can notice things more seasoned engineers don’t. If something isn’t clear, ask about it (even if only privately to your boss) until it becomes clear.

6. Sometimes the tool is broken. Not you.

Early last year, I was doing some experimenting with AWS on my own at work, going between the command line and the web UI to launch instances, tailor and tweak them, and get used to the interaction between different aspects of the tool. But for a few weeks at the very beginning, things just didn’t work right. I’d follow a tutorial, enter a command, and – what even the hell? Trying to spin up an instance would fail. Security groups wouldn’t work right. And, worse still, I was so new and the failures were inconsistent enough that I couldn’t deduce any logic from what was happening. I was failing and didn’t feel like I was learning from it, one of the worst feelings. I rarely have reason to wonder if maybe I’ve been secretly stupid all along, but in that handful of weeks, I’d stop sometimes and wonder if engineering was finding some sad new quality of mine that had been hiding throughout my career.

Then another senior engineer got hired and had a little time before being put on a client. He found that our AWS account was old enough that it worked differently than more recently created ones do. He made a new account. Suddenly, tutorials made sense, and my results were predictable – including my errors. I was so relieved I had to stop and stare into space for a few minutes to absorb it all. AWS and I are friends now, despite our rocky start, but I would never have figured this out on my own.

My suggestion to you: sometimes the problem is between keyboard and chair, sure. But sometimes it is not. Ask questions, pair with someone, and make sure that someone who knows more than you witnesses your sticky moments sometimes. It’s ego-deflating, but it’s better than spending days or weeks flailing in some swamp that isn’t of your own making.

7. Timing is everything.

If you have even a semi-active sense of curiosity, you can spend endless amounts of time reading docs, essays, StackOverflow speculation, comments, comics, reviews by the competition, helpful blog posts, amusingly bitchy blog posts, and so many other things that may be very useful, completely useless, or – worst of all – approximately 29 percent useful. It’s that last one that can eat your afternoon. If you aren’t aware of this particular hazard, you can lose an hour or four much more easily than you might have ever suspected.

My suggestion to you: timebox that shit. And if you have access to someone more experienced than you, work out a relationship where you can come to them pretty regularly for reality checks and course corrections before you sail yourself deep into the ocean of chatty, chatty internet people. It’s ok to ask a more senior person to rule out some obvious stuff before you dig into researching your problem.

8. Unless the docs are shit, trust the docs.

(And if the docs are shit, should you really be using the thing it’s documenting at all?)

I realized recently (thanks to talking with one of my bosses; see the previous section), that I’d developed a habit I’ve nicknamed narrative research. I’d come to believe that the most efficient way to work through problems was to try to match my problem to someone else’s phrasing, find their solution on this or that third-party site, try to get that solution working to fix my problem, and then work backward to find out why what I had done worked, to learn a larger lesson from there.

Perhaps you’re already seeing the problem here.

If the tool you’re using requires the backassward methodology of someone in a completely different context than you to get it to work, it may be time to examine if you’re using the right tool – or, perhaps more likely, if you’re doing it right at all. You can stir your coffee with a screwdriver if you really want to, but there are better ways to use it. If you have a problem to solve, research just enough to find what library or whatever it is you need to use – and then use its own documentation. Don’t work off-label unless you really need to. Probably check with someone more experienced, if you really think this is a good idea.

My suggestion to you: there be dragons in Stack Overflow sometimes. Stay with primary resources as much as you can.

9. If you’re a person who does the caffeine thing, get your coffee game down.

I most often need one between three and four pm, just to perk my brain up to get through the rest of my day. A single Americano is a great way for me to address this. Recently, I messed up and overcaffeinated myself via the rookie mistake of using a bigger glass than usual for my cold brew. I spent the afternoon sweaty, with racing thoughts. Not a good look.

This is general life advice too, but I’ve found it more critical in this job than any other. It may seem surface, and maybe it is surface, but having your biological needs in check will let you do better at this.

My suggestion to you: know thyself.

10. Don’t be a hero when you’re sick.

This is especially important for me and my consulting colleagues who have a vested interest in quality billable hours, but: if you’re sick, be sick. Don’t soldier through. (And not just because of the obvious part about not being a disease vector. Seriously, stay off my BART if you’re ailing and have sick time to use.) If you feel like shit, you’re not going to be able to brain, and this work requires a functional brain more than any other job I’ve had. The others could be difficult too (especially the UX consulting gig I had just before I went to engineering school), but it’s just… different. Pack a snack, sleep enough, and pay attention when you’re sick.

My suggestion to you: be an adult and be honest with yourself. Sleep enough, eat enough, and stay home with pho from Seamless if you’re under the weather. Treat yourself like you’re parenting a toddler – you know, honest assessments. Sometimes you just need a snack; sometimes you need to stay the hell in bed.

11. And, finally: decency counts.

This is an industry riddled with social fuckery, and even people who found it worthwhile to stick it out usually have at least a couple really vile stories of colleagues and managers acting like total assholes. I work in a magical unicorner of the industry that’s largely free of that, but – get this – I still get points just for being housebroken and friendly enough that it’s pleasant to share space with me. It still seems to be considered remarkable in this industry (though it’s a requirement to work at my company). Can you treat a troublesome team with human decency? Can you be polite and keep it together even when you’re having a bad feeling and not getting your way? Do you have a regular life, and can you make nice chit-chat about it without it being a big thing? Congratulations: you have an important skill.

Beyond that, social stuff in tech is just different than it is in other industries. I’ve always been lucky enough to have coworkers I wanted to be friends with too, but there’s a certain all-banding-together kind of feeling in tech that I haven’t seen anywhere else. In some companies, it’s a natural side effect of putting a bunch of 22-to-29-year-olds with a shared predilection for alcohol in the same space for 60-plus hours a week. But even then, it has a function – when stuff gets hard, that empathy and caring and shared knowledge comes together, and everything functions better.

My suggestion to you: be cool, honey bunny. And, even if you have limited social energy (I certainly do), try to conserve some of it to spend time with your coworkers once every week or two. A lot of people are lovely, and the stuff about being a good member of a team is easier if you’ve taken a real interest in the people around you.

There you go, new engineer. There you go, Breanne of a year or two ago. And here are a few more resources that I’ve found really useful in the last year. I didn’t even write all of them myself.

  • How to edit your PATH variable (and what PATH is): I had the hardest time getting an answer to this, which was tough when I was already learning a lot about how a computer works when you’re not just using it to dick around on the internet. So I pestered my coworkers for answers until it felt coherent and wrote it down. I hope it helps you too.
  • 7 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting at a Developer Bootcamp: my friend and coworker Emily Chen wrote this, and I really wish I could teleport it back to myself in spring 2015. Why this isn’t a prereq for every immersive programming school, I do not understand.
  • The rad illustrations of Julia Evans: always thorough and yet always approaching subjects from a unique angle, her illustrations are such a nice companion for whatever you’re learning.
  • And, just, you know what? Wikipedia is the shit for computer science stuff. Surprise! There’s a lot of legit documentation out there (ahem, man pages, ahem), but Wikipedia is so often a great place to start, and seeing unfamiliar stuff laid out in a familiar format can be really helpful if you’re stumped.

Restoring Github Repo Access in the Terminal after Adding 2FA

Molding, windows, and walls of central room of Oakland's 16th Street Station

This is the second time I’ve had to look this up, and the instructions are spread across a couple of pages. So for the sake of my future self, I’m compiling the steps here. Maybe it’ll help someone else too. That’d be cool.

So you added 2FA to your Github account. (Very smart; nice job.) Problem: your terminal no longer accepts your (still valid) password when you’re trying to push to a repo. Here’s how to fix that.*

1. Create a new personal access token.

Go to Github and ensure you’re logged in. (An aside: you’ve saved your access codes in a password manager or some other secure place in case the device you designated for 2FA authentication codes catches on fire, right? Excellent, carry on.)

Go to the upper-right corner of the page, click your profile image, and click Settings. In the sidebar of the next page, scroll to the bottom and click Personal access tokens. Click Generate new token. Give it a name that will make your future self grateful for today’s clarity. Select what permissions you want this token to give. Then: Generate token. The token that appears will only be visible right now, so make sure you save it or do what you need to do with it. (Or save it to 1Password and then proceed to the next step.)

2. Save it to your OSX keychain credentials

Here’s the choose your own adventure part: do you have Github credentials saved for more than one Github account on this machine?

2a. Nah, just one. Let’s nuke it and replace it.

Cool, let’s get rid of the old credential first. Go into your terminal and type this:

git credential-osxkeychain erase

There’ll be a pause and then nothing. That means success. (I still find this convention strange, but I like a verbose interface, so that’s my own struggle to deal with.)

Now, do that push that you were probably trying to do when you realized you’d cut off access on a machine you perhaps don’t code from so often. It’ll ask you for your username and password. Give it your username as usual, but instead of your password, paste that Personal access token that we created in the last step into the terminal. Hit enter. Wait. Enjoy your success (which will be confirmed by a message this time).

2b. I’m super cool and access SO MANY accounts. Let’s just replace one, please.

Alright, fancy. For this one, we’ll start with the Keychain Access app instead of the terminal. (Don’t worry, we’ll finish in the terminal for this step too, if you prefer.) Open Keychain Access and then type in “Github” to narrow down the options listed. You’re looking for an entry for github.com. To confirm you’re looking at the right one, ^click and select “Get info” from the menu that appears. Confirm that the username you’re looking for is the one listed under account, then select Access Control and confirm that the option listed is git-credential-osxkeychain. If those two things look right, we’ve found the right credential.

Now you can edit it there, replacing the existing password with your new token, or you can delete it and provide the new credential via the terminal when prompted after you try to push again, as described in 2a.

There you go! Such security, what authentication.

Want to double-check my work? Here’s what I used to put together these steps (both times, because sometimes that’s what it takes):

And if you haven’t set up 2FA for Github yet, my god get on that ok wow with the instructions here.

*On a Mac. That’s the context here. Mac Mac Mac.

Header image is from my recent visit to Oakland’s 16th Street Station, which is usually closed up. In this case, my access was granted by paying to be part of a photo tour. Authentication comes in many forms.