Jonathan Hill has taken an interesting perspective in his recent post looking more at some of the average financial costs around being a web developer.

With Software Development topping 2014′s top jobs list, I thought I would share how much it cost me to become a web developer, and what my monthly expenses look like nowadays.

He breaks it down into a few different categories, listing an average price for each:

• Initial (start-up) costs for hardware and software
• Training costs
• Recurring costs

Obviously, not all of the software and tools he lists are needed for every software developer, but it does give some perspective. Thankfully, he also links to some free alternatives to the tools he mentions that can reduce these costs as well.

In the latest entry to his blog, Mikko Koppanen shows how to take the power of Imagick and harness it to check and see what sorts of colors an image contains:

The code in the example reduces the image colors to 10, then discards all but one pixel of every color and then creates the palettes out of those colors. This might not be the most accurate way to do this, but at least it's fast.

His code makes three different "palettes" from the image - average, dark and light - and outputs them as a range of colored boxes for each all of the three palettes. Examples of the output are also included in the post.

In the latest entry to his blog, Mikko Koppanen shows how to take the power of Imagick and harness it to check and see what sorts of colors an image contains:

The code in the example reduces the image colors to 10, then discards all but one pixel of every color and then creates the palettes out of those colors. This might not be the most accurate way to do this, but at least it's fast.

His code makes three different "palettes" from the image - average, dark and light - and outputs them as a range of colored boxes for each all of the three palettes. Examples of the output are also included in the post.