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Building a GitHub Actions script to fetch metadata from multiple YouTube channels, and save it into a Markdown file
I recently created a list of Jerma fan channels, and have now added automatically updating channel statistics! This requires interacting with YouTube’s API, parsing JSON, writing Markdown, merging files and more, so here’s a full guide to building something similar.
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Introducing "The Jerma List™️", a list of 70+ Jerma-related YouTube channels 📺
As anyone could probably figure out from my thousands of YouTube video views and hundreds of hours on Twitch, I’m a big fan of Jerma985. Since there’s… hundreds of fan channels, it’s easy to miss some amazing content, so I created a complete(ish) list!
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Different approaches to conversation transcript formatting in Markdown 🗣️✍️
I’m currently trying to write some fiction, and conversation transcripts are a key part of this. However, there doesn’t seem to be any standard way of displaying a conversation transcript in Markdown, with plain text looking pretty ugly! Here’s a few approaches, and my recommendation.
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Experimenting with GitHub's "alert" markdown syntax
Back in May 2022, GitHub announced the ability to display “alerts” within Markdown documents on the site, by using a new syntax. These alerts originally only supported ℹ️ Notes and ⚠️ Warnings, however this week the 💬 Important category was added. Here’s how (and when) to use these alerts, and their limitations.
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How to discover your Jekyll site's total word count, longest / shortest post, and more 🔡
I’ve been writing blog posts for quite a few years, and when a single post can easily be thousands of words… my total word count must be in the hundreds of thousands! To find out, I expanded an existing Jekyll plugin’s functionality, here’s how to use it.
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How to automatically display your latest posts (from multiple RSS feeds) on your GitHub profile
GitHub profile READMEs are a relatively new addition (2020), letting devs add a little description of themselves, and even display dynamic content like latest blog posts or current Spotify track. Whilst I’ve had a basic README for over a year, I recently added a combined list of recent articles from all my sites using a GitHub Action.
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Using custom Slack emojis (& reactions) to help define a team identity, encourage engagement, and shape culture 🎉
Emojis are fun. As weird as it sounds, custom emoji reactions are one of the main reasons I find Slack and Discord so comfortable to use in comparison to things like Microsoft Teams 😌! So, what makes custom emojis such a useful, even essential feature in a chat platform?
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New project: Pixel Blacksmith 2 AKA Purple Blacksmith
8-9 years later, it’s time for a sequel to a project I worked on obsessively, which taught me all the basics of Android development and publishing! Pixel Blacksmith’s sequel has finally started development, here’s all the info on the game, and some explanation for why it’s happening now.
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An example of onboarding process & documentation for remote developers joining a specialised team
Onboarding engineers to a project is hard. Especially if you’re in a small team (e.g. Android developers) without a whole HR framework, and instead have to make up your own processes! I’ve onboarded tens of engineers (and been onboarded of course), so here’s a few mistakes I’ve learned from, and my current preferred approach for onboarding new engineers.
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Introducing "diet.co.ke", a silly mini-project
This weekend I discovered Kenya sells “co.ke” domains. Obviously the only thing to do was register “diet.co.ke”, and put up a fun little landing page!