Our Magazine
HACKER BITS is the monthly magazine that gives you the hottest technology stories straight from Hacker News. We select from the top voted stories for you and email them to you in an easy-to-read email magazine format.
hacker bits
Learn more, work less, stay current.
new bits
Welcome to issue 111 of Hacker Bits!
We have a great selection of articles this month covering career development, microcode hacking, breaking AES, “normal” engineers, Bank Python, AI blindspots, WebAuthn, and so much more!
As always, please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any suggestions or feedback! 🙂
– Ray and Maureen
content bits
Learn more
- Career Development: What It Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP by Dave Kellogg
- Visualising data structures and algorithms through animation by Steven Halim
- Zen and the Art of Microcode Hacking by Google
- Learn How to Break AES by David Wong
- The Internals of PostgreSQL by Hironobu Suzuki
Work less
- “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams by Charity Majors
- Troubleshooting: A skill that never goes obsolete by Curiositry
- Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code by Simon Willison
- An oral history of Bank Python by Cal Paterson
- You might not need Redis by Victor Blomqvist
Stay current
- AI Blindspots – Blindspots in LLMs I’ve noticed while AI coding
- Career Advice in 2025 by Will Larson
- Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI by Nickie Louise
- Software engineering job openings hit five-year low? by Gergely Orosz
- A Tour of WebAuthn by Adam Langley
Tell us what you think. Leave a comment below, email us or find us on Twitter @hackerbits.
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Past Issues
Our Contributors
(just a few)
Scott Hanselman
Scott is a web developer and has blogged at hanselman.com for over a decade. He works in Open Source on ASP.NET and the Azure Cloud for Microsoft out of his home office in Portland, OR. Scott has 3 podcasts, hanselminutes.com, thisdeveloperslife.com and ratchetandthegeek.com.
Kent Beck
Kent is a software engineer, author, coach and creator of Extreme Programming. He was 1 of the 17 signatories of the Agile Manifesto and a leading proponent of TDD. He pioneered design patterns and his current academic project is a study of software design.
Aline Lerner
Aline is the co-founder and CEO of interviewing.io. She likes ranting on the internet about how hiring is broken, and her work has appeared in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company.
Tim O’Reilly
Tim is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Considered by many to be the best event producer, computer book and video publisher in the world.
Troy Hunt
Troy is a Pluralsight author, Microsoft Regional Director and Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and world-renowned internet security specialist. He’s the creator of “Have I been pwned?”, the free online service for breach monitoring and notifications and blogs at troyhunt.com from his home in Australia.
Heidi Roizen
Heidi is the Operating Partner at DFJ, a lecturer on Entrepreneurship at Stanford, and a recovering entrepreneur.
Jeff Atwood
Jeff is a software developer, author, blogger and entrepreneur. He is known for the programming blog Coding Horror, and is the co-founder of the Q&A website Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network.
Our Interviews
Henrik Joreteg
Henrik is a Progressive Web App developer, consultant, and educator. He is the author of Human JavaScript and creator of Ampersand.js, SimpleWebRTC, Talky.io and over 200 JavaScript libraries. He’s also spoken at O’Reilly’s FluentConf and FFConf.
John Sonmez
John is the founder of SimpleProgrammer.com, author of the bestselling book Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual and creator of over 50 professional developer courses ranging from iOS, Android, Game Development, Java and more.
Patrick J. McGinnis
Patrick is a venture capitalist and private equity investor who founded Dirigo Advisors, after a decade on Wall Street, to provide strategic advice to investors, entrepreneurs, and fast growing businesses. He is the author of The 10% Entrepreneur, published by Penguin books.
Our Objective
Our objective is to help programmers of all levels take control of their career success by learning more, working less and staying current. This is the basis for all decision-making at HACKER BITS.
We serve you by publishing the best collection of articles each month, so they are learning more, working less and staying current with the latest technologies. Ultimately, the monthly selection of articles aims to offer tips, tricks, in-depth reviews, increased productivity and better code.
We serve our experts by providing a platform for reaching and teaching to an even wider audience. As a result, both readers and authors are growing and succeeding together.
Learn. Teach. Grow.
Our FAQ
How do you select the articles?
Generally, articles must have at least 200 upvotes on Hacker News. We make exceptions if we found the article really useful. We tend to focus on the evergreen stories so that our readers can learn, the authors can teach and everyone grows.
What is the format of the magazine?
The format is not set in stone. However, we aim to run 15 stories every month:
- 5 stories to help you learn more
- 5 stories to help you work less
- 5 stories to help you stay current
If we feel a story is really worth reading, we may run more than the quota for each category.
Our Team
We (Ray and Maureen) are a husband and wife team from Redmond, Washington.
Ray Li
Ray is a software engineer and data enthusiast who has been blogging at rayli.net for over a decade. He loves to learn, teach and grow. You’ll usually find him wrangling data, programming and lifehacking.
Maureen Ker
Maureen is an editor specializing in technical and science writing. She is also a writer and her work has appeared in a variety of adult and children’s publications such as the New York Daily News, Newsday and Scholastic magazines. She has written 3 books and her latest book chronicles the food history of Singapore.
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