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

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

A devDuck update!

Hey everyone,

First off, thank you to everyone who has purchased a devDuck (or a bunch!) and thanks to all who have given us feedback. @trogus and I are thrilled at the incredible response these ducks have gotten. If you haven’t seen them yet, you can check them out at https://devDucks.com or the devRant Swag Shop (https://swag.devrant.io).

We are trying to process all of the orders as quickly as possible and our goal is to have all current orders out by the middle of this coming week. Many orders have already shipped, but if yours hasn’t, rest assured it will very soon!

If you ordered a Java devDuck or cape, your order might be delayed a bit until the middle of this coming week because Java seems to be a heavily-demanded cape and we needed to get the material shipped in to make more of that, specifically.

So far we’ve gotten some awesome feedback from the community. A short list of possible future additions based on what’s been requested: Go devDuck, Kotlin devDuck, Perl devDuck, Android devDuck, and possibly some devDuck accessories like little hats, sunglasses, headphones, etc. If you have any other ideas just let us know:)

Lastly, please know that even with the launch of devDucks, we remain extremely committed to the devRant product and we have some very exciting big devRant features coming very soon.

Thanks again everyone!

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

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)

Announcing a few new devRant Android/iOS features, available immediately in the latest versions of the devRant app which just went live.

1. As pictured, you can now easily scroll to the bottom of any long rant by selecting “scroll to bottom” in the ... menu of any rant with >= 10 comments.

2. At the bottom of any rant that has at least 1 comment, you’ll now see a button that allows you to refresh the rant (and scrolls to the bottom) so you can see new comments if there are any.

3. Any rant can be refreshed by tapping the “Rant” title in the title bar.

How did we come up with these awesome ideas/decide to add these features? For most of them, we didn’t! At least 2 of these were recently requested by devRant users (some requested a bunch of times) and we heard everyone and saw how much these were needed. Remember, you can always suggested features in our GitHub issue tracker: https://github.com/devRant/devRant - we always appreciate feature suggestions and ideas for improvements!

Just to add one note - we still have plans to improve commenting functionality, but we’re hoping for the time being these additions make things a little more intuitive.

Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks everyone!

everyone was doing clients.. so it was my turn.

watchRant is out!!!

devRant client for your watch, for the ones who need a higher dose of devRant!

Features: rant feed (top/recent), rant, comments, profile (about/.../avatar/rants), download images

Github: https://github.com/joewilliams007/...

Works with wear-os minSdk 28

(apk available on github, can be sideloaded by using easy fire tools android app, or built by urself)

FR rant
Warning : Do not use devRant in the lavatory, especially the shower.

So i was browsing devRant in the lavatory like a normal human being (?) and saw a post super funny, laughed so hard, and dropped the phone. Now the bottom left of my phone doesnt work.

So i was browsing devRant in the lavatory like a normal human being (?), went inside a shower without noticing that i went into the shower, turned on the faucet without noticing that i turned in the faucet, and i was attacked by fierce water with the pressure level 10 (10 is the max). Then i found out my favorite snoopy t shirt, which i wore just before coming into the lavatory, is wet. Completely. And water is dripping from my phone's charging port, but works flawlessly for 5 days.

So i was browsing devRant in the lavatory like a normal human being (?), writing this rant, and just because i feel tired, i moved a little bit and got my bottoms all wet which feels so bad...

So the final thing i would like to say is a feature request. Please check whether the user is in the shower or not. Lavatory is fine. But shower is not. You can use thr data retrieved from thw humidity sensor.

List of phones with humidity sensor : https://phonegg.com/list/...

Android sensor reference docs : https://developer.android.com/guide...

I want to learn more about this community, it seems like there is a diverse group of devs here, so I wanted to create some polls about for everyone to see below (it would be helpful if you vote!). Here are a few for everyone:
OS: http://www.strawpoll.me/14004183
Programming language: http://www.strawpoll.me/14004228
Time on devRant: http://www.strawpoll.me/14004247
IDE of choice: http://www.strawpoll.me/14004260
Topic you find most interesting: http://www.strawpoll.me/14004295

---For specific devs---
Web: http://www.strawpoll.me/14004315
Android: http://www.strawpoll.me/14004324
Backend: http://www.strawpoll.me/14004342

Add any polls you want answered, were surprised about, or tag someone

This is a proposal for an entirely free and open source rant like site/app.

devrant today has a couple of problems that I hate:
* Posts in the wrong categories (usually by new users)
* Low effort posts in the "recent" feed
* Good posts in the "algo" feed that are too old
* Longtime bugs
* No official code format in comments, ffs.
* Unimplemented features (like inability to search posts in android, or inability to mute posts in web desktop)
* Lack of admin involvement with the community

but it also has some aspects that I like a lot:
* Admins aren't trigger happy to suspend/ban you
* The avatars are awesome and help to associate users to faces
* The ++ system is good enough
* The community isn't too big so you know pretty much everyone
* There's a lot of variety in the roles and techonologies used by users
* Experienced ranters are usually smart
* Super simple UI
* The comments have only one level (as opposed to reddit comment trees)

This project should try to reimplement the good things while fixing the bad things.

I wrote two posts about a possible manifesto, and an implementation proposal and plan.
https://rantcourse.ddns.net/t/...
https://rantcourse.ddns.net/t/...

I think the ideas outlined there are very aligned to concerns of privacy and freedom users here vouch for.

This project is not meant to **purposefully** replace/kill/make users abandon devrant. People can continue using devrant as much as they want.

I'm hosting a discourse site on a 5$ linode machine to discuss these things. I don't know if it's better than just github.

If you feel that you would like to just use github issues, let me know. I'll create a github org tomorrow, and probably setup gitter for more dynamic discussion.

!Rant

Hello devRant!!
Just released a small little app to share links to your PC directly from your device (Linker).
It uses a Java server running on your PC so there are no middle-men. Everything is open source and on my GitHub.

It's currently in alpha. Basically:
1. Run server on your PC (no UI ATM so run in a console) - defaults: 0.0.0.0:8090
2. Add the server IP-Port in the Android app
3. Share a link from any app through linker
4. Magic 😎

Below are the links if anyone likes the idea and wants to try it out (UI is crap I know! - I had very little time to work on it)

Become tester:
https://play.google.com/apps/...

App:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/...

https://devrant.com/rants/4408042/...

Another one. Next phone is definitely an Android. Fuck this shit.

!rant

Request for DevRant android app:

Currently when I tap a rant on the feed I am greeted by an empty screen while it is loading all details. Usually I am on a slow mobile connection so this can take quite a while.

My suggestion is to load the rant text (and image) which you already have from the feed view into the newly created single rant view. This way I can already read and inspect the rant while loading the details.

One objection to this might be the truncated rants. However, when I checked the api when developing http://jsRant.com it turned out that the feed response isn't truncated at all. This is a ui thing, meaning that my suggestion could be implemented fully in the app without backend changes.

Please consider this suggestion @dfox or @trogus since it would make the app a lot more user friendly for those with a slow connection.

Updated the devrant-web block/filter script, it now also filters based on avatar link, to not have random "commented on your rant" leak into your notifications - forgot myself I've had that script, you're of course welcome to block me too, if I annoy you, that'll make both out lives on devrant easier: https://github.com/7twin/...

Best paired with the notification categories too: https://github.com/7twin/... for an overall better experience.

Just make sure to use tampermonkey, as other implementations usually lack half the necessary style injections, selector supports etc.

I might revive my plugin'able cross-platform (desktop, ios, android, web) app too, which would out of the box feature this and many other things.

Made my own "devRant" ("inspired hehe") Android app/socialmedia^^

(still in BETA) Not targeting a specific area though. http://stardash.de:4000/

And no not a devRant replacement cuzz its not soo much dev Related :)

Layout has no similarities aT aLl :D

App can only be downloaded on my website cuzz im not 18 yet so i cant publish to the playstore (and also i kinda dislike Google and using anything Google connected in a app e.g. Firebase)

There is a build in update center in the app though.

Server:

My Pc (Linux)
Nodejs with Express
Mysql

App:

Android Studio mostly with Retrofit

skyRant, an unofficial devRant client has received a new update!

You can now read devRant's unofficial magazine in the app! Plus, view the latest matrix messages. The user interface has been updated too! [and more]

Read on it over on kbin.melroy https://kbin.melroy.org/m/drbboard/... or even in the new skyRant magazine page!

Note: any previous version of skyRant must be uninstalled before updating. Download from here: https://devrant.com/rants/6573682/...

here's a preview!

I kinda hate brand bias, when people don't have an open mind when judging new products.

some people are ready, up late, waiting for next apple keynote just so they have stuff to rip off.

"animoji is so pointless"
then don't use it buddy :)

"apple tracks you"
https://maps.google.com/locationhis...

"apple product limits you, google products allow you to do a lot more"

- apple iphone:
· download apps
· surf the web
· make calls and send texts
· do things offline
· use the native devRant app

pixelbook/chromeos:
· browse the fucking web
· there's a fucking 'write protect' screw in the motherboard so you can't fuck anything up

(yes I know, generally android is more customizable, but you'd expect more from a laptop over a computer)

I'm not an apple fanboy, I could make this rant about android hate, too, but because a product isn't for you doesn't mean it's not for everyone.

I installed this app called Android P rotation. Link below -
https://play.google.com/store/apps/...

This is how devrant behaves when turned to landscape mode

There was cool ad at the top of the screen (of devrant android app) with link to https://www.devrant.io/get. I've clicked it, but the page is constantly reloading in browser.