I remember poring over BYTE issues desperate for any technical detail! Issues that stood out: one on data compression and the one about the Taos Operating system.

MSJ (Microsoft Systems Journal) was another good one!

There’s a wonderful software magazine in Japan called “Software Design” that is complete with code examples and tutorials on various topics, including web programming (both front-end and backend), Python development, Linux system administration, databases, and much more. It’s issued monthly and has been published since 1990, constantly keeping up to date with the latest technologies. The latest edition features AWS, storage, and containers.

https://gihyo.jp/magazine/SD

I always purchase a copy of Software Design whenever I visit Tokyo.

I think so. Even if it's a little watered down at times, it's nice to have the strong focus on a given topic every time. It's also just nice to be able to go back to specific issues. I like to think of them as discussion starters: you can share them with your team, and do a little bit of a deeper dive into any of the given topics. It's really helpful to see some companies of various size's opinions/organization on specific issues(the architecture issue has a great example: https://increment.com/software-architecture/architecture-at-...).

It's also pretty spread out between issues(quarterly) so it's not very spammy.

How do things like links work in what I assume is a paper copy?