A devRant Update!

Hey everyone,

We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.

Highlights since our last update:

- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.

- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!

- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!

Some stuff we have in the pipeline:

- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!

A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:

We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.

What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!

Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.

Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus

I definitely made a channel in the dev Slack I'm in for algo practice with the description bigOHNOtation.

I spend all morning on trying to solve an Algo problem for upcoming interview practice (Euler #3) that comes down to implementing IsPrime.

I remember reading once how Sieve of Eratosthenes

Isa the right way to go do when I first started I wanted to use that.

Then I couldn't think of the right code though so I went with Brute Force (for all numbers upto X see X is divisible by it)

It actually worked but I wanted to just try the "right way".

It's way slower and actually ended up with the wrong answer...

But at this point I don't give a **** anymore.

I guess lesson learned... Use Brute Force first... Then optimise for a problem more elegant solution.

Sharing progress on a project I started two days ago.

Elevator pitch: a personal (open-source) photography website where you can search my repository of photos by color, brightness, orientation, resolution, and subject.

I got a new camera and it actually performs very well and it made me realize that there's a lot of interesting data in images, so I've decided to convert my personal blog into a photography-centered personal blog.

My first idea, the one that actually drew me into starting the project, was to pick colors from my images (colorpicker/ eyedropper style) and then on the home page, those colors would appear in a grid and you could click them to see related photos.

Cool idea, but clunky and not very useful in practice.

So I implemented median-cut algorithm to generate a palette from an input image. It has its weaknesses, but it's consistent and does a job that makes you go "yeah that's about right" in 99% of cases. It generates 8 colors and then a second algo removes any colors that are within 5% distance from one another.

Before the color theory nerds ask, YES - I am using plain-old RGB and you can suck my balls. I don't care about human perception enough - not for this project at least.

Then, these colors (and other basic image analysis like brightness) are stored in the DB and related to the image entity from the upload.

Then the user (not yet implemented...) can do the reverse. Either they can choose colors from a colorpicker, or they can upload their own photo to get a palette and then the colors are looked up in the database and the related images are shown in the search results.

This will be combined with a somewhat complex tree-style system for the subject of the photo. For example, a subject like "crow" can be related to the subject "bird" which itself can be related to the parent subject "animal". So if you search by crow, you'll only get crows, but if you search "animal", you'll get birds, crows, etc.

While it's not exactly a reverse image search like google images has, I think it's a somewhat refined take on a way to explore a photography repository - especially a personal one.

I am developing the management portal and the public facing portals as separate projects due to separation of concerns - and so I can avoid implementing (and upkeeping) authentication for ONE user (me) so it just runs on my local network.

Screenshot is the current iteration of the upload page for my management portal, which will eventually take care of watermarks etc etc.

Lol all my creations are useless to a good extent. I work on them just for practice. Here is a short list of them.
1) c program for every kind of sorting algo
2) stack implementation for checking paranthesis and prefix postfix shit in java
3) Treeview implemention with basic utils like create, update, delete in python