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

Update: https://devrant.com/rants/5445368/...

My previous bosses were real awesome people. However, the current one is an intentional asshole.

He wants to review every piece of work. He thinks I am a retard who knows shit. He has no sense of feedback vs. humiliating criticism.
Fucker questions every single word.

For example, consider the following statement, "They are taking the Hobbits to Isengard."

He'd critical question every word like,
What do you mean by 'they'?
Why have you mentioned it?
Why does 'They' exists in English vocabulary?
Why cannot you try 'Your'?
What data points you have?

And after endless questioning, he'd repeat the same with next word. Making sure to break my spirit of working for him.

And let me add that his communication is saturated with heavy jargons which are difficult to understand. At times, I slow down to understand and absorb and he has a problem with that as well.

My past experience says that I learned a lot from strict managers.

But this fucker intentional criticises every aspect with zero to negative appreciation. All in the name of feedback.

I have gotten tons of compliments and good ratings in the past based on my communication and thought process. However, this fucker feels that my thought process is shit and I don't know how to communicate. Furthermore, he feels that I lack sense of ownership.

I really don't know what he saw in my resume or me to even hire me in the first place.

Given how he treats me and others, no wonder people are leaving. And if he fires me, good luck to him finding a sensible replacement who matches his expectations or puts up with his crap.

Sometime in the mid to late 1980's my brother and I cut our teeth on a Commodore 64 with Basic. We had the tape drive, 1541 Disk Drives, and the main unit and a lot of C64 centric magazines my dad subscribed to. Each one of the magazines had a snippet of code in a series so that once you had 6 volumes of the magazine, you had a full free game that you got to write by yourself. We decided to write a Hangman game. Since we were the programmers, we already knew all the possible words stored in the wordlist, so it got old quick. One thing that hasn't changed is that my brother had the tenacity and mettle for the intensive logic based parts of the code and I was in it for the colors and graphics. Although we went through some awkward years and many different styles and trends, both of us graduated with computer science degrees at Arkansas State University. Funny thing is, I kept making graphics, CSS, UI, front end, and pretty stuff, and he's still the guy behind the scenes on the heavy lifting and logical stuff. Not that either of us are slacks on the opposite ends of our skilsets, but it's fun to have someone that compliments your work with a deeper understanding. I guess for me it was 2009 when I turned on the full time DEV switch after we published our first website together. It's been through many iterations and is unfortunately a Wordpress site now, but we've been selling BBQ sauce online since 2009 at http://jimquessenberry.com. This wasn't my first website, but it's the first one that's seen moderate success that someone else didn't pay the bill for. I guess you could say that our Commodore 64 Hangman game, and our VBASIC game The Big Giant Head for 386 finally ended up as a polished website for selling our Dad's world class products.