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Hey everyone,
First off, a Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!
Tim and I are very happy with the year devRant has had, and thinking back, there are a lot of 2017 highlights to recap. Here are just a few of the ones that come to mind (this list is not exhaustive and I'm definitley forgetting stuff!):
- We introduced the devRant supporter program (devRant++)! (https://devrant.com/rants/638594/...). Thank you so much to everyone who has embraced devRant++! This program has helped us significantly and it's made it possible for us to mantain our current infrustructure and not have to cut down on servers/sacrifice app performance and stability.
- We added avatar pets (https://devrant.com/rants/455860/...)
- We finally got the domain devrant.com thanks to @wiardvanrij (https://devrant.com/rants/938509/...)
- The first international devRant meetup (Dutch) with organized by @linuxxx and was a huge success (https://devrant.com/rants/937319/... + https://devrant.com/rants/935713/...)
- We reached 50,000 downloads on Android (https://devrant.com/rants/728421/...)
- We introduced notif tabs (https://devrant.com/rants/1037456/...), which make it easy to filter your in-app notifications by type
- @AlexDeLarge became the first devRant user to hit 50,000++ (https://devrant.com/rants/885432/...), and @linuxxx became the first to hit 75,000++
- We made an April Fools joke that got a lot of people mad at us and hopefully got some laughs too (https://devrant.com/rants/506740/...)
- We launched devDucks!! (https://devducks.com)
- We got rid of the drawer menu in our mobile apps and switched to a tab layout
- We added the ability to subscribe to any user's rants (https://devrant.com/rants/538170/...)
- Introduced the post type selector (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...) (which will be used for filtering - more details below)
- Started a bug/feature tracker GitHub repo (https://github.com/devRant/devRant)
- We did our first ever live stream (https://youtube.com/watch/...)
- Added an awesome all-black theme (devRant++) (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...)
- We created an "active discussions" screen within the app so you can easily find rants with booming discussions!
- Thanks to the suggestion of many community members, we added "scroll to bottom" functionality to rants with long comment threads to make those rants more usable
- We improved our app stability and set our personal record for uptime, and we also cut request times in half with some database cluster upgrades
- Awesome new community projects: https://devrant.com/projects (more will be added to the list soon, sorry for the delay!)
- A new landing page for web (https://devrant.com), that was the first phase of our web overhaul coming soon (see below)
Even after all of this stuff, Tim and I both know there is a ton of work to do going forward and we want to continue to make devRant as good as it can be. We rely on your feedback to make that happen and we encourage everyone to keep submitting and discussing ideas in the bug/feature tracker (https://github.com/devRant/devRant).
We only have a little bit of the roadmap right now, but here's some things 2018 will bring:
- A brand new devRant web app: we've heard the feedback loud and clear. This is our top priority right now, and we're happy to say the completely redesigned/overhauled devRant web experience is almost done and will be released in early 2018. We think everyone will really like it.
- Functionality to filter rants by type: this feature was always planned since we introduced notif types, and it will soon be implemented. The notif type filter will allow you to select the types of rants you want to see for any of the sorting methods.
- App stability and usability: we want to dedicate a little time to making sure we don't forget to fix some long-standing bugs with our iOS/Android apps. This includes UI issues, push notification problems on Android, any many other small but annoying problems. We know the stability and usability of devRant is very important to the community, so it's important for us to give it the attention it deserves.
- Improved profiles/avatars: we can't reveal a ton here yet, but we've got some pretty cool ideas that we think everyone will enjoy.
- Private messaging: we think a PM system can add a lot to the app and make it much more intuitive to reach out to people privately. However, Tim and I believe in only launching carefully developed features, so rest assured that a lot of thought will be going into the system to maximize privacy, provide settings that make it easy to turn off, and provide security features that make it very difficult for abuse to take place. We're also open to any ideas here, so just let us know what you might be thinking.
There will be many more additions, but those are just a few we have in mind right now.
We've had a great year, and we really can't thank every member of the devRant community enough. We've always gotten amazingly positive feedback from the community, and we really do appreciate it. One of the most awesome things is when some compliments the kindness of the devRant community itself, which we hear a lot. It really is such a welcoming community and we love seeing devs of all kind and geographic locations welcomed with open arms.
2018 will be an important year for devRant as we continue to grow and we will need to continue the momentum. We think the ideas we have right now and the ones that will come from community feedback going forward will allow us to make this a big year and continue to improve the devRant community.
Thanks everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community!
Looking forward to 2018,
- David and Tim
45 -
Hey everyone,
Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!
Tim and I wanted to reflect on the year devRant has had, and looking back, there are a lot of awesome things that happened in 2018 that we are very thankful for. Here are just a few of the ones that we thought of (this list is not exhaustive and I'm definitley forgetting stuff, so please comment about those!):
- After nearly a year in the making, the completely overhauled devRant web version was launched (https://devrant.com/rants/1255714/...)
- @linuxxx became the first devRant user to hit 100,000++! (https://devrant.com/rants/1157415/...)
- We once again pulled off the greatest April fools joke everrrr (https://devrant.com/rants/1311206/...)
- @trogus started making awesome devComics and http://devcomics.com was launched
- We added a feature to allow rant filtering by post type (https://devrant.com/rants/1354275/...)
- We made it so avatars could have expressions! (https://devrant.com/rants/1563683/...)
- We had a booth at TechDay New York and got to meet some devRant users! (https://devrant.com/rants/1394067/...)
- We made major backend architectural improvements - including spinning up a special high-powered-CPU web server to handle avatar creation and make the creation process much faster (https://devrant.com/rants/1370938/...)
- App stability: mainly Android - we fixed crashes, did a push-notif overhaul, and tried to continue making the apps better and more stable
- A record amount of devRant meetups were held, and we couldn't be more proud about that, and we thank every person who organized one! (just a few: https://devrant.com/rants/1588218/... https://devrant.com/rants/1884724/... https://devrant.com/rants/1683365/... https://devrant.com/rants/1922950/...)
We had a busy year, and despite some things going on for us personally and some setbacks around those, we think this was a very productve year for devRant and that we are going in the right direction. We're continuing to constantly evaluate feedback from members of the community to decide where to take the app next. We're fully committed to improving the devRant community in 2019 and we have a lot of ideas about how we can do that. We're working on some things, but we're not really announcing them yet, so please sit tight for those :) In the meantime, feel free to let us know what you'd like to see improved/added the most as we always like to get updated feedback from the community.
As always, thank you everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community!
Looking forward to 2019,
- David and Tim
26 -
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
38 -
EDIT: devRant April Fools joke (2019)
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Hey everyone!
Today, @trogus and I are very happy to announce a devRant feature that we’ve been working on for many months. After extensive time and money investment, it’s finally here! Introducing, pixelated avatars!
@trogus came up with this awesome idea about a year ago, but we couldn’t get it just right so we had to tons of work/research to make those pixelated avatars give the full sense of retro and ULTIMATE pixelation. We think everyone will appreciate how this effort turned out.
Anyway, let us know what you think, and we hope you enjoy!
p.s. here is @trogus’s avatar - the model we used to make sure the feature is perfect!
51 -
Hey everyone,
Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!
We had a bit of a slow year in terms of devRant updates, but we gained some momentum towards the end of the year and we're looking forward to carrying it into 2020. Recently, we launched what I think are our coolest new avatar items yet (https://devrant.com/rants/2322869/...) and behind the scenes we got our iOS/Android apps on the latest version of the frameworks we use, which will help us continue to improve stability. Still, we definitely would have liked to do more, but we're optimistic the coming year will bring great things for devRant.
One thing we are very proud of is this year we had our best year ever in terms of platform stability and uptime. Despite the platform growing and our userbase growing, we had almost no complete app downtime even though our infrastructure is minimal. A large part of this is thanks to devRant++ supporters, who allow us to maintain a small but effective tier of infrastructure and redundancy.
In the coming year, we're going to launch one of our most ambitious initiatives yet, and we're also going to continue to improve the devRant experience itself. We want to try to gather more user feedback, so we'll be working on a way to do that too. Stay tuned, more on this stuff coming soon.
As always, thank you everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community! And thank you to our awesome devRant++ supporters for continuing to be the main drivers to keeping devRant up and running.
Looking forward to 2020,
- David and Tim
28 -
Wan't your own personal devBanner?
Now you can have one!
We're building a powerful banner generator over here: https://devrant.com/collabs/...
The first version is up and running, still basic tho.
You can generate your own by calling this URL:
https://devrant.nuernberger.kim/api...
You'll have to replace "Kimmax" with your devrant name and the value after subtext with the extra text.
A cool domain is already on it's way!
We'll be working on a frontend and a ton of extra features to make this banner even more awesome.
If you got any nice ideas add them to the issue tracker here: https://github.com/cozyplanes/...
Have fun!
94 -
@dfox, @trogus: Just came back and WHOA! Awesome avatars! I want to make my avatar like me, but there's no long wavy hair. Or heels. Or skirts/dresses. You get the idea. Can we get a couple more feminine options for the females?
*smiles intensively and flutters eyes*😇4 -
DevRant is a wonderful community, and the last thing any of us would want it to lose it. I think DR should have ads. To think that DevRant grew so fast and large, yet they haven't implemented ads shows just how awesome these guys are. But, it worries me to think that it's only supported by merch and people paying for collab and avatar stuffs scares me. Just a small ad at the bottom of the screen, I'm sure most of us wouldn't mind, and if it helps these humble and amazing people who created DevRant, I would be more than happy.17
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Today I decided it was a good time to give back to the developers of this awesome platform. I bought some 'Shiny new avatar items' and subbed to the Supporters thing. The community is just great. Keep up the great work guys.
Also, Would it be possible to move the phone a few pixels further away from the monitors? Looks a little bit weird atm.
6 -
!Rant
So @-ScratchOs just gave me my 1000 +1.
I want to thank you all for being so awesome. I have never felt more welcome than here. Thank you @dfox and @trogus for making this.
No one in my school shares my passion for coding and so it is very nice to meet people with the same hobby here.
Also, why are all the cats you can select for your avatar so chubby?4 -
Am I the only one that wants so fucking much save this new Rant's avatar and put it into all social profile pictures?1
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@dfox awesome avatars, the devRant avatars are really nice addition and just avatar we can edit them too.1
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The only things my devRant avatar is missing is a couple of LEGO models, some loudspeakers and a subwoofer under the table.
But what the hell. devRant is still awesome.2
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