Having written my fair share of bit-twiddling hacks in low-level code, my takeaway is that because the hack code doesn't resemble what it actually does, it's al

Having written my fair share of bit-twiddling hacks in low-level code, my takeaway is that because the hack code doesn't resemble what it actually does, it's all too easy to create bugs. Unit testing the living daylights out of any bit-twiddling code path is a must. Also helpful: being able to represent integer types with binary. Since I'm not a genius and I write code to be maintained by other not-geniuses, `mask = 0b_1010_1010` is clearer than `mask = 0xAA`.