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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!
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How I built the Google Play purchase history analyser
I just added a Google Play purchase history analyser on my non-programming blog, along with instructions, and thought I’d save the technical details of the JavaScript project for here!
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Open sourcing Pixel Blacksmith and my other old Android games
I originally got into Android development by making a game in my spare time, Pixel Blacksmith. This game ended up becoming way more popular than I could have imagined, and persuaded me to follow app development as a career! Now, I’m open sourcing this and other game codebases.
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Blog updated (v2.1) with table of contents and anchor links!
Whilst Jekyll’s Minima theme is great, there’s a couple of very basic features I wish it had by default. I added the features myself today, and decided to start doing “release notes” style posts for the codebase used in both my blogs!
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Fixing a BottomNavigationView that insists on being too tall
At work, we’ve had a bug that has appeared intermittently since before I joined. The navigation bar at the bottom of our app would very rarely become absolutely massive. For seemingly no reason. Today, I finally freed us from this menace!