Several years ago, I came across Felix Geisendörfer's Pull Request Hack. The premise is simple - if people are making decent Pull Requests to your project then you should give them commit access.

It sounds mad, I know. But it has worked really well in my case. I launched Super Tiny Icons six years ago. It was surprisingly popular and lots of people seemed to enjoy using them - and a few even contributed.

So I gave them Commit access. That means they are able to push directly to my codebase. They can also approve other people's Pull Requests.

Like I say, totally mad and irresponsible.

But people are, by and large, lovely.

Over the years, I've added about 20 random people as collaborators. Some have been more active than others. A few have refused to take on the responsibility. But several are still there - saving me dozens of hours, and helping even more people contribute.

What's the worst that could happen?

OK. Lots of things. The Pull Request Hack probably isn't suitable if you're running big projects. And it is almost certainly a stupid idea if you write code which is actively used by multiple downstream projects. And if your stuff has even the slightest chance of compromising security then you're better off sticking to trusted members.

But if you're just farting around with some scrappy code and you want a quick way to build an ad-hoc team? I don't want to go full "Cathedral and Bazaar", but it is pretty fucking magic.

And it gives me a modicum of hope that some of my work might continue after I'm gone. Sorry, that's a bit morbid.

So a huge thank you to everyone who has contributed.

Here are three quick tips for shaving a few bytes off an SVG.

Decimal Magic

SVG co-ordinates can have decimal precision, like: 123.456. But what about co-ordinates which are less than one? 0.123 can be rewritten as .123 - we can drop the 0!

These two sed commands will turn 0. to . and -0. to -.

sed -i -z "s/ 0\./ \./g" *.svg
sed -i -z "s/\-0\./\-\./g" *.svg

What's my (new) line?

For boring technical reasons to do with teletype printers, Windows machines use two characters to represent a newline. CR the Carriage Return send the print-head back to the start of the line, then LF is the Line Feed to move the paper by one line.

Unix just uses LF. Because no-one uses teletypes.

The brilliant dos2unix program will convert all Windows-style newlines to Unix style. Magic!

Last Line

Most text editors add a newline to the end of any file you create. Why? Who knows.

Remove any trailing newlines from the file with:

sed -i -z s/\\n$// *.svg

Using the above three commands, I've been able to shave off dozens of bytes from these files. A worthy endeavour, I'm sure you'll agree!

If you want to make images as small as humanly possible, come join us.