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 17 of Hacker Bits!
June marks the half-way point in the year of 2017. So what are you learning? How are you being more productive? What are you doing to stay current? Let us now. 
We’ve got some feedback from y’all about JavaScript articles, so we’ve found some highly-upvoted ones this month. Learning and improving are also common topics we’re hearing from you, and we’ve included a number of articles about that as well.
Keep letting us know what you think, and enjoy the new issue!
– Ray and Maureen
content bits
Learn more
- JavaScript: The Right Way by William Oliveira
- Zen and the Art of Unit Testing by Marcin Chwedczuk
- Green Tea Press – Free Books (also published by O’Reilly) by Allen Downey
- Ask HN: How do you keep improving?
- Elements of JavaScript Style by Eric Elliott
Work less
- Programmer Competency Matrix by Sijin Joseph
- Evidence-based advice we’ve found on how to be successful in a job by 80,000 Hours
- How to talk about yourself in a developer interview by Nick Larsen
- The 10x developer is not a myth by Yevgeniy Brikman
- Prepack helps make JavaScript code more efficient by Facebook
Stay current
- Ask HN: What are some good technology blogs to follow?
- My giant JavaScript Basics course is now live on YouTube. And it’s 100% free by Beau Carnes
- What programming languages are used late at night? by David Robinson
- An experienced Javascript developer’s account of learning React by Gianluca Guarini
- Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who’re Still Coding by Vladimir Kazankov
Tell us what you think. Leave a comment below, email us or find us on Twitter @hackerbits.
Our Contributors
(just a few)
- Connector.
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.
- Connector.
Bill Sourour
Bill is the founder of DevMastery.com. A 20 year veteran programmer, architect, consultant, and teacher, he helps individual developers and billion dollar organizations become more successful every day.
- Connector.
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.
- Connector.
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.
- Connector.
Joe Armstrong
Joe is the inventor of the programming language Erlang. PhD in computer science, and Adjunct Professor of computer Science at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
- Connector.
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.
- Connector.
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.
- Connector.
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.
- Connector.
Matt Mazur
Matt is a developer at Automattic where he focuses on growth for WordPress.com. He currently lives in Orlando, Florida, with his wife and two kids.
- Connector.
Ossi Hanhinen
Ossi has been writing web stuff since he was in elementary school. He is always trying to learn something new and interesting — nowadays surrounded by the brilliant people of Futurice.
- Connector.
Heidi Roizen
Heidi is the Operating Partner at DFJ, a lecturer on Entrepreneurship at Stanford, and a recovering entrepreneur.
Our Interviews
- Connector.
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.
- Connector.
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.
- Connector.
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
- 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 the author of 3 books and 100+ articles, and her work has appeared in the New York Daily News, and various adult and children’s publications. In her free time, she enjoys collecting useless kitchen gadgets.