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How minor bugs and security flaws can erode user trust: Examining my unfortunate experience with Bloggie.io
Whilst wandering through GitHub recently, I discovered the Tokyo-based Bloggie.io, a markdown blogging platform that gave a great first impression. Unfortunately, after an hour or so of clicking around, I realised my enthusiasm and trust had completely eroded. But why & how?
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How to migrate a Jekyll Minima blog from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (UA to GA4)
When I first set up my Jekyll blog with Minima, it had built-in support for Google Analytics. Great! However, only using a legacy “Universal Analytics” ID seemed to work. This was fine for a few years, until I discovered the system is being sunset, and all users need to move to Google Analytics 4 ASAP… Here’s how to do it.
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Using gitStream for 'Continuous Merge': automatically approving safe PRs, assigning reviewers, estimating review time, and more
gitStream is a GitHub app that aims to improve the PR review process, a common bottleneck during development. It aims to extend CI/CD to include CM: Continuous Merge. In this post, I’ll explain what it is, how it works, and what it can be used for.
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6 useful Google Sheets analysis formulas and techniques from my Twitch data analysis
I recently published a guide to analysing your Twitch data, from streamers watched to emotes used. This involved a lot of amazingly complicated Google Sheets formulas, enough to warrant a separate write-up. There are 6 extremely helpful formulas if you’re in a similar scenario, and should be somewhat interesting if not!
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How to count the number of pixels per colour in an image, without installing any software
Whilst working on a new project recently, I needed a list of all hex codes used in a very large pixel art image (1,000,000 pixels), sorted by how many pixels had each colour. I struggled to find any simple solution, so here’s how I did it!
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How an MVP-inspired approach to small feature development can improve your work's visibility & flexibility
In the last ~20 years, MVP releases have thankfully become the standard way of developing software. However, this mindset can be taken further, and used as a way to work on an individual ticket or feature, even as a solo dev. Why? Well, here’s a whole post full of motivations…
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How to migrate from Utterances to Giscus for Jekyll comments
Since migrating from Wordpress to Jekyll, this blog (and my non-tech blog) has used Utterances for comments, which creatively uses GitHub issues for comment hosting. However, since then GitHub has released the “Discussions” feature which… is a much better fit! Luckily, Giscus is a way to use these, and can easily be migrated to.
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From 99% to 99.99%, why & how to chase 100% Crashlytics crash-free users
In services with uptime, availability is often measured in the number of 9s, e.g. “4 9s” is 99.99% uptime. Whilst installed apps themselves don’t tend to have uptime in the same way, they do have another critically important metric: % of crash-free users! I’ve always heavily focused on this metric, so here’s some of the things I’ve picked up whilst chasing 100%.
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A brief review of the (free) Google Play Store Listing Certificate as a developer
Back in December, I got an email about something called the “Google Play Store Listing Certificate”. It seemed pretty relevant to my job, and I finally got round to completing it! It’s mostly targeted towards digital marketers, but it has value for engineers publishing on the store, so here’s a short unbiased review.
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Fixing Jekyll Anchor Headings links for multiline headings
As mentioned a few weeks ago I’m now using the jekyll-anchor-headings scripts to add links to each header. This works great, but… unfortunately has side effects if the header is more than one line. Time to fix that!