Today we have an exciting devRant announcement! As many observant members of the community have problably noticed, since launch we've been using the domain name devrant.io since the .com was already taken. Today, we're happy to announce, we now own devrant.com and it is now the official devRant URL!

How did this happen you ask? The devrant.com domain was already owned by a developer named Wiard when we launched devRant. It took a while to track him down, but when we did, turned out he saw the good we were doing and wanted to help the devRant community by generously offering us the .com domain for a very reasonable exchange (considering that we are a self-funded bootstrapped startup!).

Since Wiard recently started writing a blog on devrant.com, he had to find a new home for it. His new blog is https://sysrant.com and I encourage everyone to check it out! Great topical/educational dev/sys-admin related articles? Check. Someone who cares about the devRant community and allowed us to leave the firey hell that is .io? Check. So check it out!!

Some technical info:

This change is immediate and all devrant.io non-api requests will now redirect to devrant.com. We might have missed a few things (purposely or accidentely) so we're going to be going through and converting anything that's left. If you use the devRant API, your implementation should not break since API requests are meant to be excluded for now, but I highly recommend switching any API URLs to https://devrant.com so you can avoid issues in the future if we decide to stop redirecting devrant.io API requests. Also one note, there was an issue for about a minute after we turned on the redirected where some API requests to devrant.io might have 301 redirected to devrant.com. If an app you were using broke, try clearing whatever cache the 301 redirect might be stored in and the issue should go away.

Feel free to post any questions you might have here (and please let me know about any issues you might discover!), and once again, huge thanks to Wiard!

We're excited to announce the first devRant-sponsored hackathon! It features everything we could have dreamed of in a hackathon: huge prizes ($10k to first place and others), an awesome beer-themed dev competition from lead sponsor Anheuser-Busch, lots of free beer, and an awesome setting at Alley in Chelsea NYC (devRant's hometown, we'll be there!)

It's taking place right here in NYC from March 25-26 and @trogus and I will be there and we really hope we can hang out with members of the devRant community who are participating. devRant is an official partner of the hackathon and we're very excited about the competition itself. There are two challenges teams can pick from: "Internet of Things" (Raspberry Pi’s, Arduinos, etc.) and "Data Insights" - both with the goal of finding creative solutions/innovations to help people drink more beer!

Tim and I look forward to hopefully seeing many of you there. Full details and registration here: https://hacktheworld.beer/NYCHackat...

Please let us know if you have any questions and let's hack some beer!

P.S. the hackathon is 21 years and older only because of the beer theme

Hey everyone,

We have a few pieces of news we're very excited to share with everyone today. Apologies for the long post, but there's a lot to cover!

First, as some of you might have already seen, we just launched the "subscribed" tab in the devRant app on iOS and Android. This feature shows you a feed of the most recent rant posts, likes, and comments from all of the people you subscribe to. This activity feed is updated in real-time (although you have to manually refresh it right now), so you can quickly see the latest activity. Additionally, the feed also shows recommended users (based on your tastes) that you might want to subscribe to. We think both of these aspects of the feed will greatly improve the devRant content discovery experience.

This new feature leads directly into this next announcement. Tim (@trogus) and I just launched a public SaaS API service that powers the features above (and can power many more use-cases across recommendations and activity feeds, with more to come). The service is called Pipeless (https://pipeless.io) and it is currently live (beta), and we encourage everyone to check it out. All feedback is greatly appreciated. It is called Pipeless because it removes the need to create complicated pipelines to power features/algorithms, by instead utilizing the flexibility of graph databases.

Pipeless was born out of the years of experience Tim and I have had working on devRant and from the desire we've seen from the community to have more insight into our technology. One of my favorite (and earliest) devRant memories is from around when we launched, and we instantly had many questions from the community about what tech stack we were using. That interest is what encouraged us to create the "about" page in the app that gives an overview of what technologies we use for devRant.

Since launch, the biggest technology powering devRant has always been our graph database. It's been fun discussing that technology with many of you. Now, we're excited to bring this technology to everyone in the form of a very simple REST API that you can use to quickly build projects that include real-time recommendations and activity feeds. Tim and I are really looking forward to hopefully seeing members of the community make really cool and unique things with the API.

Pipeless has a free plan where you get 75,000 API calls/month and 75,000 items stored. We think this is a solid amount of calls/storage to test out and even build cool projects/features with the API. Additionally, as a thanks for continued support, for devRant++ subscribers who were subscribed before this announcement was posted, we will give some bonus calls/data storage. If you'd like that special bonus, you can just let me know in the comments (as long as your devRant email is the same as Pipeless account email) or feel free to email me (david@hexicallabs.com).

Lastly, and also related, we think Pipeless is going to help us fulfill one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from the community. Now, it is going to be our goal to open source the various components of devRant. Although there’s been a few reasons stated in the past for why we haven’t done that, one of the biggest reasons was always the highly proprietary and complicated nature of our backend storage systems. But now, with Pipeless, it will allow us to start moving data there, and then everyone has access to the same system/technology that is powering the devRant backend. The first step for this transition was building the new “subscribed” feed completely on top of Pipeless. We will be following up with more details about this open sourcing effort soon, and we’re very excited for it and we think the community will be too.

Anyway, thank you for reading this and we are really looking forward to everyone’s feedback and seeing what members of the community create with the service. If you’re looking for a very simple way to get started, we have a full sample dataset (1 click to import!) with a tutorial that Tim put together (https://docs.pipeless.io/docs/...) and a full dev portal/documentation (https://docs.pipeless.io).

Let us know if you have any questions and thanks everyone!
- David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus)

Well, this has been one hell of an awesome ride already. I’m at 70K+ and the biggest ranter as for reputation (those upvote thingies). Although I don’t care about being the biggest one currently, I do take pride in it but I’ll get back to that one later on. (I’ll very likely lose the first place at some point but oh well, couldn’t care less :))

I joined back in May last year through an article I found on https://fossbytes.com (thanks a bunch!), joined and was immediately addicted. The community was still very tiny back then and I’ve got to say that getting upvotes was also not the easiest :P. But, I finally found a place where I could rant out my dev related frustrations: awesomeness. I very much remember how, at first, reaching 1K was my biggest devRant dream and it seemed to be freaking impossible. Then I reached 1K and that was such a big achievement for me! Then the ‘dream’ (read these kind of dreams (upvotes ones) as things that would be awesome to reach not just for the upvotes but for participating, commenting, ranting, discussing and so on within the community, so as in, it shows your contribution) became 10K which seemed even more impossible. Then I reached 10K and 20K seemed freaking impossible but I got there a little faster and from that point on it’s been going fast as hell!

It’s always been a dream for me to become a very big but also ‘respected’ or especially well known user/person somewhere because that pretty much never happened and well, having dreams isn’t wrong, is it?

The biggest part of that dream, though, was that it would be a passion of mine that would get me there but except for Linux, the online privacy part was something I always deemed to be ‘just impossible’. This because irl I ALWAYS get (it’s getting less though) ridiculed for being so keen on my privacy and teaching others about it. People find me very paranoid right away but the thing is that if they ask me to explain and I actually present evidence for my claims, it’s waved away as if it’s nothing. (think mass surveillance, prism, encrypted services, data breaches and so on)
I never thought I’d find any other people who would have the same views as I do but fucking hell, I found them within this community!

Especially the fact that I’ve grown this much because of my passion is something I am proud of. It’s also awesome to see that I’m not the only one who thinks like this and that I’ve actually find some of you on here :)

So yeah, thanks to everyone who got me where I am now!

Also a big thanks to sir Dfox and Trogus for putting your free time into making this place happen.

Love you peoples <3 and to anyone ‘close’ on here I forgot, if you match any of the comments as for privacy/friendliness etc, don’t worry, those nice things also apply to you! My memory just sucks :/

P.S. Please do NOT comment before I comment that I’m done with commenting because I’ve got a lot of comments coming :D

2017 Recap + DEVBANNER !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

1. So, let's recap my 2017 first. It was awesome
Here is some list that I can remember
- finding my hobby (fsx, vatsim)
- finding computers aren't genius
- creating a new language
- major improvements in my unity skills
- found out i am friendly
- getting a job at google in a dream
- creating my banner in krita --> devbanner collab :D
- Logo creation fail
- CS class apply fail
- getting free stickers for the first time of my life
- getting death threats (lol)
- finishing my first ever big c# project
- got offensive words from a bot that i am a f***ing d***head.
- getting downvotes after creating such a shitty meme
- getting my rant featured in twitter
- finding that my friends love my game
- getting a sneak peak at the src of devrant
- coding with turbo c
- not using git cuz too lazy
- finds out msdn is god
- slowly hating unity, but likes it cuz it is using c#
- reaching level 2 in google foobar
- started 100+ projects this year and finished about 6 of them.
- devRant motivated me a lot

2. devBanner stuffs
So, how it all started is when I wanted to create my own logo. Some people will remember it. The one with arrows and cozyplales written on it. Then, I created my own banner with Krita (their text tool sucked). After that, due to some suggestions by the community, I decided to create a collab. From then, many people contributed to the devBanner project. Special thanks to @Kimmax for his awesome prototype of the frontend made during I was sleeping.

Now, before I talk more, I want to talk something. I don't post a rant about my collab cuz i want to get upvotes. I just want more people to use this simple creation software. You can literally use them anywhere, and it is FOSS.

Well....
If you want to create again, you can do so at https://devbanner.center

If you want to contribute, please do so by visiting https://github.com/devBanner

We are looking for a skilled frontend dev who can do the basic web stuffs. (we don't use frameworks currently for our frontend)

---------------------

Thanks everyone for making 2017 awesome. Can't wait to welcome 2018. Happy new year everyone, and I will drop my banner here.

You know what really pisses me off about the dev community is the circle jerk that ensues when someone bashes something they have no experience in. Take yesterday's React bash on Reddit and DevRant. Thomas Fuchs compared React and JSX to the intermingling of HTML CSS and JS of 15 years ago. If you knew anything about React or spent 1 hour learning what it's about you would immediately know why that isn't true but no, a giant circle jerk ensued comparing it to PHP! I'm sorry but HOW can you compare a pure JS view library that is renderable by the browser, to a full fledged server side language?? Not to mention the React approach uses a completely different programming paradigm of functional programming.

When I first saw React and Redux I realized what this is all really about, a shift in the paradigms of programming. React + Redux is the first time that functional programming has entered mainstream. We've had functional programming available to us via Haskell and more recently Clojure for a while now but it was never very obvious how powerful functional programming could be outside of the niche that used it for more analytical type tools. Now we have things like hot reloading (https://youtube.com/watch/...) and state playback (https://youtube.com/watch/... skip to ~3min to watch the magic) thanks to immutable state.

Before you decide that React is just another flavor of the month library I encourage you to learn about the advantages that functional programming provides (https://medium.com/@cscalfani/...) and checkout Elm (http://elm-lang.org/) as well. The nice thing about React + Redux is that it gives us a way to start programming functionally, without having to learn ML style syntax like Elm and ClojureScript. Keep in mind, when Object Oriented Programming was becoming popular it was widely controversial as well and look at all it has done for us.

Alright, I've already ranted about this but I feel like that was rather incomplete.. there's some other things that make me want to kill myself every time I enter <!DOCT- WHERE IS THAT FUCKING KNIFE?!!!

First one I've mentioned earlier is its <repetitiveness></repetitiveness>. What was wrong with {brackets}? If only HTML was more like CSS.

But there's some other ones as well.

- Frameworks! Ain't there nothing like a good dozen resources that every single one of your web pages wants to get JS from.

- Quantity over quality. Let's just publish early with tonnes of bugs, move fast and break things, amirite 🤪

- General noobness of apprentice web devs. Now I'm not talking about the real front-end devs here - AlexDeLarge was one of them.. forever holding a special place in my heart - that know how to properly use their tools. But there's a metric shitton of people who think that being able to write <html><body>Hello world!</body></html> makes them a dev.

- The general thought of "it's slow? Slap in more hardware." Now this is a general issue with software development, optimization costs valuable resources while leaving it in a shitty state but released quickly costs pretty much nothing. A friend of mine whose post I'll attach in the image section illustrates this pretty well. You can find it at https://facebook.com/10000171480431....

I'm not sure if this is an exhaustive list, but those are the most important things that irritate me about web development in general.

On a side note, apparently 113 people visited my hiddenbio.html page.. I'm genuinely impressed! I had no idea that so many people on devRant would click through. On Facebook pages this has been an ongoing significant issue of getting people to leave the platform - it's huge but engagement on off-Facebook links is terrible. I guess that I'm dealing with an entirely different community here. And I'm pleasantly surprised actually!

Jake Wharton
https://github.com/JakeWharton
https://twitter.com/JakeWharton

Used to not work for Google /Android, but since the entire Android community uses about everything he makes, and then everything he touches turns into gold and becomes part of the Android SDK sooner or later, because his work is so useful and good. He now works for Google / Android. He's one of the Android gods, a true rockstar dev!

@Gerrymandered recently posted a rant, https://devrant.com/rants/1003724/..., and his reasons, which I won't really go into much, are completely legitimate.

We were talking in class and he was getting annoyed with people hating others for actually trying to defend the different flavors or Operating Systems. I've gone into it once or twice, but I feel the need to again. I'm actually going to be blunt this time, unlike my last one:

Linux has its niche. If you like it, then it usually works.
Windows has its niche. Businesses ***typically*** choose it first (with few exceptions, @linuxxx don't even bother coming in here to defend Linux. Love ya and all, but you really piss me off sometimes. Just saying.)
macOS has its niche. If you're a designer, try it. You might be surprised.

Can people shut the fuck up with the constant bashing of every single OS in existence with a focus seemingly on Windows? We get it, the dev community LOOOOOOOOOOVES to fucking hate Windows. Who doesn't? It can be broken as hell, but for a lot of purposes, it works. If I want to use Windows, then let me, and if you complain that because I'm a techie or anything that I can't use it, please go fuck yourself with a moldy rusty fork left out in a hurricane 20 years ago.

That is all.

This February, I posted a !rant here ( https://devrant.com/rants/1999689/... ) about getting a NLP internship with the help of the community.
In the past few months, I have gone up, and now I have a job offer from a small organisation (StrataVAR) as their Python dev.
I received the offer letter today. Since I am in the third year of graduation, then want me to work parallel to the university classes, they pay way above Indian freshers' average, and they have put me in a team that works on things I like.

It would not have been this way without the help and support of the communities I'm a part of, such as DevRant and StackOverflow (obviously). I just wanted to thank all who cared and helped. It means a lot.

(If you don't know what I'm talking about, read this: https://www.devrant.io/rants/805543 )

I have good news!
Finally, my PC is back alive :'D
I took it to where I first bought it, and...
Apparently the reason why it broke was the AC adapter, as they replaced it with a new one... (the PC was still in warranty)

So now I can finally begin to program again and (hopefully) tell you some dev-related rants! So I can actually feel an active part of this community, haha ♡

!rant

For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:

As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/

And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/

Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.

Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?

Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.

Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)

Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.

Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.

Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.

What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.

how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)

I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.

Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:

(+ 0.1 0.2)

Watch in awe at what you get.

In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"