New for avatars - emotions! You can now change your facial expression on your avatar to better capture your dev mood! Getting expressions working right turned out to be quite the undertaking due to the ripple effect of the various layers that each expression touched so our total layers just for men ballooned out from 300 layers to 1100. And @dfox re-architecting how layers work to handle the interconnectedness of expression meant tying together facial expression, skin tone, facial hair, and hair color to make sure everything stays in sync. It’s a fun new addition, I hope everyone enjoys!

I also want to apologize for the delay in getting this out, I meant to have this done ages ago but I got thrown a curveball at work and was laid off back in April and have been super stressed running around trying to find a new job for the past 3 months. I figured I’d have more free time to work on devRant, but hunting for work is so exhausting, it’s really taken its toll emotionally and financially (no unemployment benefits because according to my state even though we lose money every month “you’re still a corporate officer”). Things are finally looking promising on the job search front, and I expect once things get back to normal @dfox and I can get our release velocity back up, but until then, please bear with me.

P.S. If you have the resources, we certainly do appreciate your support with devRant++ Your monthly contributions really do make a difference! Thanks all!

If my rant gets -175, do I need to send @dfox & @trogus a stressball then?

I think the weekly rants just exist because @dfox & @trogus got banned from stackoverflow and they still have questions.

When it comes to learning cutting edge tech... Go build already!

I found Rust intimidating.

I read the first few pages of the official book, got bored, gave up.

Few months later, decided to write a "simple" tool for generating pleasing Jetbrains IDE color schemes using Rust. I half-finished it by continuously looking up stuff, then got stuck at some ungoogleable compiler error.

Few months later I needed to build a microservice for work, and against better judgement gave Rust a try in the weekend. Ended up building an unrelated library instead, uploaded my first package to crates.io.

Got some people screaming at me that my Rust code sucked. Screamed back at them. After lots of screaming, I got some helpful PRs.

Eventually ended up building many services for work in Rust after all. With those services performing well under high load and having very few bugs, coworkers got interested. Started hiring Rust engineers, and educating interested PHP/JS devs.

Now I professionally write Rust code almost full-time.

Moral of the story:

Fuck books, use them for reference. Fuck Udemy (etc), unless you just want to 2x through it while pooping.

Learning is something you do by building a project, failing, building something else, falling again, building some more, sharing what you've made, fighting about what you've built with some entitled toxic nerds, abandoning half your projects and starting twelve new ones.

Reading code is better than reading documentation.

Listening to users of your library/product teaches you more than listening to keynote speakers at conferences.

Don't worry about failures, you don't need to deliver a working product for it to be a valuable experience.

Oh, and trying to teach OTHERS is an excellent method to discover gaps in your knowledge.

Just get your fucking hands dirty!

This is where everything started. I got the chance to work with actual production code. While it is very fun to work with, in some places it's also very frustrating. And this is from where, most of my rants come from.

Thank you @dfox and @trogus for making such a beautiful community.

The best part of this community is I never have to think or take time to make jokes or posts so that I can get upvotes. I've always wanted likes or retweets or reddit upvotes. But it never worked out because I have to think so much to make clever comments or posts. Most of the time, I gave up.

But in devRant, all I do is just share what's happening in my daily dev life. My frustrations, my happiness. That's all it takes. Everyone understands, everyone cares and everyone loves.

Over time, thanks to devRant, I've understood that I was part of the wrong community. This is the community that I deserve, this is the community that every dev deserves.

Thank you all. I love you. And I promise, more rants are coming :D

Especial thanks to @Yeah69 @kevbost @yarwest @tisaconundrum @Linux @donkeyScript . I have no idea why you guys all of a sudden rapidly upvoted me. Although I would love to reach 10k naturally but won't complain haha

You is not gonna beliebers what just happened lol

So a couple weeks ago I earned a stress ball (300+ ++'s) I sent an email about it but never got a reply, so I decided to just forget about it. But then I just ranted (lastnight) about how its so hard to get a stressball. So I basically just said "fuck it i'll buy one". Then some dude comes along and is like "omg not until he shows us the bought one" so I'm like CHALLENGE ACCEPTED and buy one...

Then I get an email confirmation from devrant store confirming my order for the bought stressball. And I notive that my spam folder has unread messages in it. i look inside the spam folder and what do I see?...

I see dfox replying to my free stressball request weeks ago lol. So yay, now I gets the 3 balls (or two - depending) lol omg, so many balls.

My duck came in, along with his two capes, the stickers I forgot to ask for, and the note I requested.

In the special instructions box, I asked that they include a note that said something random, and they delivered.

"devRant ducks do dances directly downstairs daily"

Well done @dfox @trogus or whoever does the shipments, I'm thoroughly entertained :D

Yay my stickers finally arrived! Thanks guys <3 @dfox @trogus

And it freaked out my mum. She called me all panicked like "you've got an international letter what did you do did you get scammed or something"
...
"Mum, those are stickers...I got for free"
"Ohhhh... ok then"
But shre was very worried there ^^'

tl;dr: thanks! :)

I just love this community.
The idea of devRant is great. The emotions, the shared knowledge in each post. Never seen such densely packed quality content in a social media! :D
I enjoy spending my time here, though I do not post that much. Reading just about the life of @linuxxx, @gitpush @alexDeLarge (to name a few) share with us is just wonderful, it makes me happy! :)

I think this post is meant as a thank you, I guess? Just felt like it... hope you guys don't mind having read a non-dev related post.^^'

btw:
@dfox and @trogus, you guys are awesome as fuck!

Guys! For every 300 ++s @dfox sends out a signed envelope and a free stress ball! It's like the best deal ever!

I wish there was a way to pay for devRant++ yearly. Since I have no card of my own that work outside of Sweden I have to pay my mom and use her card, which is a bit annoying to do once a month.

dfox pls fix.

One machine is mine, the other from my work

"why do the stickers come in two
because @dfox thought it through"

While I work on my devRant client, I always end up thinking, "how would dfox do it for the backend".

Some of the functions I have include:
-fetching new rants, 250 at a time
-remembering the ones I've read and filtering those out (kinda similar to Algo)
-checking for updates from followed users and new notifications

My implementions are kinda spammy though part of it is because I need to use the existing API.

But even so, how would/does he implement these so all the users' requests don't end up bringing down the server, and efficiently store and retrieve everyone's view history?

My problems are small compared to his... How do you think and deal with problems at that scale though?

Since memes have become an integral part of our community, I propose a way to handle them without affecting the actual Ranters.

Everyone adding a meme or a gag picture can do so under a particular tag, and the Algo can handle your meme needs by exposing you to that particular tag based on your activity with such posts.

Or you could just make the users search for memes if they wanted to see them.

This could also be done vice versa by ranters using a RANT tag, I would keep my RANT filter on so anything without that tag won't show up

To make it better you can provide a sort of suggested tags option :

|gag|¦¦¦|meme|¦¦¦Ranf|¦¦ scroll to the right for more... Kinda thing

@dfox @trogus please tell us what you think about this

Hey guys,

I think the topic of this week is very important.

Older, experienced devs are giving their skills and advices to the younger one.

Some of you maybe know it, I'm a young developer, who started his apprenticeship at september.

I'm feeling good there, the others are friendly. I learn a Lot there. I had experience before I started there. It's my Hobby to code so I started coding when I was 14.

You can't know anything, everyone makes mistakes, this is what I've learned and this is important to remember.
There are these days like today, when your Boss isn't there and you have to work alone. You have to do many things, and you are desperated because nothing Works, you can't ask anyone, you are completly alone. There are these days, when nothing seems to work. But there are also these days when everything Just Works fine and you are happy with yourself.
This is important to remember.
For me its very hard. Days like today are driving me crazy and I'm very sad, even when I know, that this is Kind of normal not to know everything and have Problems, especially when you are young as me and started your first apprenticeship 3 months ago.

Tomorrow I'm also alone, I'm a Little Bit feared of tomorrow (you say that in that Way? :P) When I think of tomorrow and that I don't know How to proceed and sitting there, I'm getting frustrated and Kind of sad. But I know that this will Make you even better some day, because you learn and gets better - day for day.

At least there was something good today. My stickers finally arrived! To Germany! That was fast! Thanks everyone, Thanks! And Thank you @dfox for building this great community!

What are you advices? And how you handle these situations? I hope tomorrow everything Works fine :/

@dfox @trogus

Hey, here's a suggestion.

I bet that there are lots of people who cannot afford the supporter ++, monthly cost(like me), but still want that black theme.

And my suggestion is to have another way to get something similar, maybe a gold badge, and you get it when you reach a certain number of ++'s, E.g. 1000.

What do you think?

So random thought.
How many ducks do @dfox and @trogus have laying around their houses?

I was just looking through the store, adding a duck and a stress ball and maybe a hoodie to my cart. I then realized that each item has a real photo or two attached to it.

Fucking finaly I'm back on devRant after my phone decided to die during the weekend. But why the fuck do I get a light theme again? @dfox, could you save the preferences in the profile? Or at least display the options on first start? :*

Just earlier today I was looking at the hosting packages for a local hosting provider in my country (who shall remain unnamed as I want to work there and criticizing them might not be a very good idea right now) and they start at €250/month apparently. I thought - that's fucking ridiculous!

Like for real, I could literally buy a server for.. I dunno, €600 from the likes of bargainhardware.co.uk with some pretty darn good specs, put it in my home, get a business contract with my ISP for say around €100/month (and use it for my own purposes as well instead of my consumer contract, win-win!), and the server would pay for itself in no more than half a year, probably even less! And you're even getting the actual hardware with it!! And that is for the price of that hosting provider's starting option!!!

Now I know what you're thinking, sure there's more to servers than just the server itself, like redundant power, generators, SLA, multiple routers and switches, and all sorts of failover measures. And you are absolutely right. But does that really justify a rental cost of a server of €250/month?

Not only that, even their shared hosting.. shared hosting, the dreaded, shitty shared hosting! solution is starting at around €10/month. I'm paying about €5/month for 3 light-duty servers and a domain for Christ's sake!

So.. is this hosting provider just expensive as fuck or is this really the industry standard, particularly for the dedicated hosting part? And maybe that's why some services like.. say devRant which apparently gets around €600/month from 299 supporters at the time of writing, yet still has @dfox and @trogus pay from their own wallets for it (if at all possible, please let me know if that's still the case).. I wonder if those costs are all really justifiable?

It just strikes me as odd.. you can get *a lot* of server for a couple hundred bucks if you do it well.. no?

!rant
@dfox How do you feel about an update to the profile page? I want to link to my personal website, perhaps some regex black magic to override the github link if it matches a URL?

Or just a new input?

Question: What was the worst mistake you made in Linux?

So... Because I've finally upgraded my PC (rip money on bank account) I can now run a VM with Linux all the time that isn't slow as a snail.
I installed Linux mint, with 4Gb of Ram and 6 cores, and it runs like a brize, while I play on windows and stuff. BTW I'll be using the VM for programming stuff, since I'm finally at home (homesick because of burn out), when I'm better I'll finally have the patience and memory to learn new stuff and get my projects up and going.
And because I've never really used Linux I'm watching YouTube videos about Linux, and found a Perl I've watched before, #Linux Sucks
And It's great... I get so many laughs, but also, learn stuff I didn't know, like, how Linux Pros make mistakes that Windows users can't even do, like breaking the OS.
So... I would love to know, what was the worst mistakes you ever done on Linux? How did you brake you're system?
BTW this would also be great for noobs like me to not make them... I hope. Since I'll be moving full Linux when I'm comfortable.

BTW @dfox this would be a great wk ...

@dfox, @trogus, would you consider adding the topic for next week to be "Near miss: how I almost lost all my code/data"?

It sould be fun, and people can also learn something. Like what not to do, how to recover and how to prevent this kind of stuff...

MSG for dfox and trogus
Hey guys, have you seen my bug reports?
For all the others.. Do you have a bug where your app crashes when uploading a IMG from Android or is it just me?

Week 1 Day 5 - Week 2 Day 5

"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop" - Confucius

He had a lot of great quotes but I think that's one every dev who's ever worked on a personal project can get behind. It's been about a week since my last rant so I've got a lot to cover, I got a little busy so my progress has been lacking but I have two days off coming up and I plan on making all my meals ahead of time and turning my phone off to limit distractions.

So far I've worked my way through the first lesion on layouts and getting/editing views by the id. This seems pretty basic once you get comfortable with the topic. I'd like to think this will become second nature once I start to get into the guts of the course. The second lesson started working with internet connectivity and I've just started working through it. A lot doesn't make sense but at the start of the lesson one nothing made sense so I assume it'll all wrap up nicely.

I wanted to publish this two days ago (January 23) but I closed my laptop and forgot all about the rant so now it's two days later and I've made some progress, things are getting easier to understand and I'm liking it. I've also decided to start making something I've always wanted to while I work on android development. I'm going to start making an RPG I've been working on since my sophomore year of high school. I haven't written any code for my game yet but I've got the world development and story air tight. So as an ending statement, I'd like to ask anyone on devRant with game making experience how I should go about structuring my project, and some of the things that aren't going to be easy to find with google searches. I plan on, to the dismay of many other game dev's I've talked to, write it in Java because it's familiar to me and I would probably make a worse game in C++ even though that is the go to language. I'd also like to thank some of you repeat readers for silently encouraging me to keep going just by ++ing my rants every time, JoshBent and Dfox. It's been really nice seeing names pop up every single time.

Dear @dfox and @trogus

I'm writing this here because reporting such issue to GitHub doesn't seem to do it's justice.

It's been happening for like HALF A YEAR.

AND IT'S YET TO BE PATCHED.

WHY. WHEN I CLICK THE BACK BUTTON ON MY PIXEL 2 XL (ANDROID 9). ALWAYS CLOSES THE APP?!?!?

Yes, this is a rant about DevRant, I have no complaints other than this exact one.

It's been happening for way way WAY too long, and never been patched.

Please don't reply to me "why don't you report it on GitHub?" ITS BEEN REPORTED OK?!

I've always loved DevRant since I first joined, but this issue is preventing me from browsing it every time. It's jus irritating.

Please, @dfox and @trogus, try and for once take the time to try and fix it.

Thank you.

I see why dfox chose to hide downvotes...

My reaction: why the fuck would anyone even bother to downvote ...?

But now I have a dilemma.... do I keep this feature or not? I kinda get a tingly feeling being able to know how many ppl hate a post.... WTF right?

Do you guys think it would make sense to add polls to the rant categories?

Not the first time I've seen questions like "What's the average age of devRanters?" or similar, and polls would make it a whole bunch easier to read/write answers in those cases!

@dfox

P.S. Was this discussed before? If so, my bad!

Feature creep aside I do think after a few weeks of use that notifications on devrant could use a bit of work. There is a lot of interaction and it can get confusing.

Some use cases currently not supported:
- On long threads I want to know which comment of mine that got a new ++. Perhaps scrolling to it + different colour?
- Seeing the new interaction per thread rather than per timeline.
- Getting a hint on which thread people interacted with. First sentence would be useful.
- Muting threads.
- Marking individual notifications as read without opening them.
- Moving notifications out of the menu and giving them separate button to save a click (many times a day)

If something on the list is already possible I suggest it be made more obvious ;)

Apart from being full of awesome people I really like being able to sort the flow of posts. I know this isn't staffed anywhere near the big social media and it's fine the way it is. But this is my two cents even if no one asked for them.

@dfox ?

“Do or do not, there is no try”

- Yoda, when developing in Rust

Also, my mobile is stuck to always make things a question @dfox

I think it is saving it from an old rant... maybe

@dfox Now, I'm not a web dev (or really a dev of any kind quite yet) but I noticed that your web app doesn't show emoticons properly, making it confusing at times. Is this something you can set up support for on your side, or something I can or should do on my end? (This is on Chrome btw.)

@dfox @trogus
What is the tech stack used to build this...
To my best knowledge, you guys are using DigitalOcean and Shopify, what else do you use?
What is the language, server is based on?

Now I have a problem
Do I stick them now or I do it on the laptop I'll buy next month?
I want to stick them and show the world this magnificent app!!
Thanks dfox & trogus!
You made my life better

!rant

To all the devs that got their stickers + @dfox and @trogus: do the stickers adhere to uneven surfaces without leaving glue or bits of the sticker material behind? Because I've reached the amount of ++ needed to ask for my stickers (I'm gonna ask them around xmas time so it can be like a xmas present 😀 and also so my brother doesn't take them) but I don't know if I can safely stick them there and remove them if need be
My computer has this circular pattern around the ASUS logo and the area around the touchpad is also uneven, it has some grid pattern

I don't have any stickers on it so devRant's may be the first :D

Cats and dogs - I interact with both in my uni and love both of them (yea well guess which one of them actually reciprocates the love).
I'm kinda having a tough time deciding which one do I keep in my Avatar.
@dfox please add an option with both of 'em fuckers

(Note for dfox: I love this place and i would really like to have all my posts/ ++s/comment data available to me . Current system does not allow me to see posts more than some months old. is it possible? I hope devrant is not deleting old posts)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stream of thoughts coming through

#justAthought 1
If you feel you are mentally unique (Not in retarded or disable kind of way, but having a different view of thinking, a different perspective, not-a-sheep-in-a-herd kind of mentality) , then you PROBABLY ARE, its just those who are not that mentally unique will find your thoughts absurd until you are proving yourself to be a successful person.
Even though you feel something is wrong in a current situation, and you can put some valid points in your argument, there would always come a point where your personal failures or average-ness would overshadow your valid points (kind of personal experience than a thought :/ )

#justAThought2 (Disclaimer: i am no fraud guru or priest, just a 9-5 curious , sleepless student-cum-professional)
I sometimes feel that the only good, meaningful goal that i could think for my life would be : to earn enough money to set up a small experiment environment , where I would initially take, around 25-30 people for 1-2 years. It would be an environment with totally $0 value for materialistic things like money, jewels, property,etc . Everyone is living free of tensions of basic services like food, clothes, house, taxes, work to live etc. Together we all will be collectively doing just these things: Making ourselves healthy , and more kind, spiritual towards other humans, animals, plants and environment, and thinking of ways to eradicate the value of "value".
We have already reached a point where we are generating even more harmful Technology than useful tech, how about changing the way of thinking and taking a small pause? I know a lot of people would be reluctant to do any work in such environment, but i believe one day or another, every one of these people has to come back to their usual jobs , but this time, not for money but for humanity.
Do you think this kind of environment is possible for the whole world? Because today most, if not all thinks that money is the ultimate goal. can we change that, and would that change be good?

#justAthought 3 (Disclaimer : 1. Its my mom's thought/whatsapp status , i kind off liked it. she is super religious by the way ^_^! | 2. more relevant for india/multi religious countries 3. for Indians: kind of thought from movie "oh my god")

There should be a regional law during so called "acts of god"(floods, earthquakes, other natural disasters) under which the donations given to religious places(temples, churches, mosques,etc) would be used to provide relief to affected areas.

@dfox For some reason, I can favorite my own rants if I send a request to do it manually, I guess that's not... good?

@dfox I am not getting push notifications on my new oneplus 3t.... What to do?
I used android migrate feature to auto login apps from my last phone...

What languages and tools do I need to build an android app similar to devRant(same functionality)? Please help. Badly need advice for my next project.
@dfox @trogus