Somehash: A Blurhash-Inspired Image Placeholder

2025-04-15
Somehash: A Blurhash-Inspired Image Placeholder

To enhance user experience, this article introduces Somehash, an image placeholder solution similar to Blurhash but with a creative twist. Somehash extracts dominant colors from images using a Python script (leveraging KMeans clustering) and encodes them into a Base64 string. A React component decodes this string and renders an animated placeholder using lines until the high-resolution image loads. The author also discusses areas for improvement, such as optimizing encoding/decoding and creating a smoother transition to the full image.

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Escaping AWS's Surprise Bills and Over-engineered Mess: My Migration to NearlyFreeSpeech

2025-02-04
Escaping AWS's Surprise Bills and Over-engineered Mess: My Migration to NearlyFreeSpeech

Tired of unpredictable AWS costs and overly complex systems, the author switched to NearlyFreeSpeech (NFS). NFS's prepaid model gave him complete cost control, and its simple dashboard made managing multiple projects a breeze. The post details migrating nine apps to NFS, including those using Next.js, React, Express, and other tech stacks, sharing challenges and solutions encountered. While one Python Flask app proved more complex to migrate, the author attributes this to the app's dependencies, not NFS. Ultimately, the author achieved lower costs and greater peace of mind with NFS, recommending it to other developers.

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