Things I got wrong about image compression

Plain text keeps winning for small personal projects. I ran into this again last week, so here is a short note for future me.

Most of the time the simplest tool is good enough. There is probably a better way, but this one is easy to remember. The fix turned out to be one line, after an hour of looking in the wrong place.

Naming things clearly helped more than any clever trick. I wish someone had told me this when I started. Writing a tiny test first made the problem obvious. After cleaning things up, the whole thing runs noticeably faster.