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

Recap: https://www.devrant.io/rants/878300

I was out Thursday at the Hospital. I'm what the doctors would call "Ill as fuck"

So, Friday I’m back in the office to the usual: "How was that appointment?"
I know people mean well when they ask this. So, I do the polite thing and tell them it went as well as it could.

Realistically it does't matter how well it went... They haven't cured Crohn's because I showed up to the appointment. They know I'm fucked already.

But, push it down, add it to the future aneurism.

I had to go through the usual resignation meetings with managers:
"We"re fucked now you're going"
"yep"
"we need to get a handle on how fucked"
"already done that for you, here"s a trello board, very fucked."
"we need to put a plan together to drop all the junior devs in the shit with the work you’ve been doing"
"You need about 4 devs, please refer to the previous trello board for your plan"

Meanwhile, me and Morpheus are in constant communication because all of this is like a Shakespearean comedy.

So, I overhear a conversation between a Junior Dev and the Solution Architect.

[SA] took over the project because he knows better than two tried and tested senior devs -_- (fuckwit).

JD: "It took me one and a half days to build it out"
SA: "Yeah, it must have taken me twice as long... It must be a problem with the project, you should just be able to check it out and run it."
JD: "I know, it has to be wrong"

All of this is about Morpheus' work of art, of an Ionic 3 hybrid app.

I fumed quietly at my desk because I've been ordered by the Stazi to be hands off.

Since Morpheus and me were pulled from the project [JD] and [JD2] were dropped into it to get it over the line.

It"s unfortunate and I was clear and honest with my advice to them: I personally would not take over the project because I"d be way out of my depth... Oh, and the App works, so uh, there's no work to do.

They have been constantly at our desks. Asking fuckdiculous questions about how to perform basic tasks. So they can get Morpheus" frigging masterpiece to the user.

It"s like watching that touch up of jesus that got borked by an amateur. Shit I have google, it's like watching this happen: http://ti.me/NnNSAb

[JD] came to me Friday evening.
"I can’t get this to build to iOS or install on [Test Analyst]'s phone."

Me: "No worries brother, where are you stuck right now?"

[JD] describes the first steps with clear indication he hasn't googled his problem.

Life lesson: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lmgtfy

Que an hour of me showing [JD] how to build an Ion3 project for iOS. Fuck it, your man's in a bind and he"s asked politely for help. I can show him quicker than he can read 3 sets of docos.

I took him through 'ionic cordova build ios', the archive and release processes in XCode 9, then the apk bundling process for droid. Finally we have an MAM so the upload process for that too.

All the while cleaning up his AppIDs, Profiles, deployment attempts.
Damn they were a mess.

I did this with a smile on my face, not because I could say "I told you so"... But. because when any developer asks you how to do something. If you know how to do it, you should always be happy to learn them some new tricks!

Dude's alright, he's been dropped in the shit. Now I know how badly so I'll help him learn things that are useful to his role, but aren't project specific.

As a plausi-senior dev (I'll tell you about that later); it's my job to make sure my team have what they need to go home smiling!

I’m not a hateful fucker, the guy asked me an honest question so I am happy to give him the honest answer.

I took him through it a few times and explained a few best practices. Most were how to do his AppID and ProvProfile set up. Good lad, took it all on board.

However! In his frustration, he pointed the finger at Morpheus' "David" (ref: Michelangelo).

He miraculously morphed into a shiny colourful parrot and fed me SA's line:
"you should just be able to build from a clean clone"

My response was calm and clear:
"You can, it took me 20 minutes on Thursday evening. I was bored and curios, so I wanted to validate Morpheus' work. Here it is on my iOS device and my Android device. It would have taken me 5 if my laptop wasn’t so horrifically out of date."

I validated Morpheus' work so I have evidence, I trust that brilliant bastard.
I just need to be able to prove it's good.

[JD] took this on board.
Maybe listening to two tried and trusted senior devs is better than listening to a headstrong Solution Architect.

When JD left for the weekend I was working a late one (https://www.devrant.io/rants/874765).

His sign off was beautiful.
"I think I can happily admit defeat on this one, it can wait until Monday."

To which I replied: "no worries brother, if you need a hand give me a shout."

Rule 1: Don't be a cunt.
Rule 2: If someone needs help and you can give it: Give it!
Rule 3: Don't interrupt James' cigarette time.
Rule 4: goto Rule 3.

In my previous rant about IPv6 (https://devrant.com/rants/2184688 if you're interested) I got a lot of very valuable insights in the comments and I figured that I might as well summarize what I've learned from them.

So, there's 128 bits of IP space to go around in IPv6, where 64 bits are assigned to the internet, and 64 bits to the private network of end users. Private as in, behind a router of some kind, equivalent to the bogon address spaces in IPv4. Which is nice, it ensures that everyone has the same address space to play with.. but it should've been (in my opinion) differently assigned. The internet is orders of magnitude larger than private networks. Most SOHO networks only have a handful of devices in them that need addressing. The internet on the other hand has, well, billions of devices in it. As mentioned before I doubt that this total number will be more than a multiple of the total world population. Not many people or companies use more than a few public IP addresses (again, what's inside the SOHO networks is separate from that). Consider this the equivalent of the amount of public IP's you currently control. In my case that would be 4, one for my home network and 3 for the internet-facing servers I own.

There's various ways in which overall network complexity is reduced in IPv6. This includes IPSec which is now part of the protocol suite and thus no longer an extension. Standardizing this is a good thing, and honestly I'm surprised that this wasn't the case before.

Many people seem to oppose the way IPv6 is presented, hexadecimal is not something many people use every day. Personally I've grown quite fond of the decimal representation of IPv4. Then again, there is a binary conversion involved in classless IPv4. Hexadecimal makes this conversion easier.

There seems to be opposition to memorizing IPv6 addresses, for which DNS can be used. I agree, I use this for my IPv4 network already. Makes life easier when you can just address devices by a domain name. For any developers out there with no experience with administration that think that this is bullshit - imagine having to remember the IP address of Facebook, Google, Stack Overflow and every other website you visit. Add to the list however many devices you want to be present in the imaginary network. For me right now that's between 20 and 30 hosts, and gradually increasing. Scalability can be a bitch.

Any other things.. Oh yeah. The average amount of devices in a SOHO network is not quite 1 anymore - there are currently about half a dozen devices in a home network that need to be addressed. This number increases as more devices become smart devices. That said of course, it's nowhere close to needing 64 bits and will likely never need it. Again, for any devs that think that this is bullshit - prove me wrong. I happen to know in one particular instance that they have centralized all their resources into a single PC. This seems to be common with developers and I think it's normal. But it also reduces the chances to see what networks with many devices in it are like. Again, scalability can be a bitch.

Thanks a lot everyone for your comments on the matter, I've learned a lot and really appreciate it. Do check out the previous rant and particularly the comments on it if you're interested. See ya!

A follow up for this rant : https://devrant.com/rants/1429631/...

its morning and i have been awoke all night, but i am so happy and feel like crying seeing you people's response. :''''') Thank-You for helping a young birdie like me from getting exploit.

In Summery, I am successfully out of this trickery, but with cowardice, a little exploited and being continuously nagged by my friend as a 'fool'.

Although i would be honest, i did took a time to take my decision and got carried away by his words.

After a few hours of creating a group, he scheduled a conference call , and asked me to submit the flow by which my junior devs will work.
At that time i was still unclear about weather to work or not and had just took a break from studies. So thought of checking the progress and after a few minutes, came up with a work-flow, dropped in the group and muted it.

At night i thought of checking my personal messages , and that guy had PMed me that team is not working, check on their progress. This got me pissed and i diverted the topic by asking when he would be mailing my letter of joining.
His fucking reply to this was :"After the project gets completed!"

(One more Example of his attempts to be manipulative coming up, but along with my cowardice ) :/

WTF? with a team like this and their leader being 'me'( who still calls him noob after 2 internships and 10 months android exp), this project would have taken at least one month and i was not even counting myself in the coding part(The Exams).
So just to clarify what would be the precise date by which he is expecting the task, to which he said "27th"(i.e, tomorrow!)

I didn't responded. And rather checked about the details of the guy( knew that the company was start-up, but start-ups does sound hopeful, if they are doing it right) .A quick social media search gave me the results that he is a fuckin 25 year old guy who just did a masters and started this company. there was no mention of investors anywhere but his company's linkedin profile showed up and with "11-50" members.

After half an hour i told him that am not in this anymore, left the group and went back to study.(He wanted to ask for reasons, but i denied by saying a change of mind ,personal problems, etc)

Well the reality is over but here comes the cowardice part:
1)Our team was working on a private repo hosted on my account and i voluntarily asked him to take back the ownership, just to come out of this safely w/o pissing him off.
2)The "test" he took of me was the wireframe given by their client and which was the actual project we 5 were working on. So, as a "test", i created 15 activities of their client's app and have willingly transferred it to them.
3) in my defence, i only did it because (i) i feared this small start-up could harm my reputation on open platforms like linkedin and (ii)the things i developed were so easy that i don't mind giving them. they were just ui, designed a lot quickly but except that, they were nothing(even a button needs a code in the backend to perform something and i had not done it) . moreover, the guys working under me had changed a lot of things, so i felt bad for them and dropped the idea of damaging it.

Right now am just out of sleep, null of thoughts and just wondering weather am a good person, a safe player or just a stupid, easily manipulated fool

But Once again My deepest regard from my heart for @RustyCookie , @geaz ,@tarstrong ,and @YouAreAPIRate for a positive advice.

My love for devrant is growing everyday <3 <3 <3 <3

So.... a while ago my non tech friends asked me to help with their game... As all of the devs out there who wish to make a game or work in HW company I decided to say YES....

Basicly the game was a 2D infinite runner and when I looked at it it seemed like it was allmost ready, but it was not :D

The codebase was horrible.... Non of those two knew how to write scripts properly.... Half of the time I spent trying to teach both of them how to code properly and make the code readable for other coders..... After that most of the time went in troubleshooting 3rd-party plugins regarding google play services and fixing anoying performance issues.....

And last friday we launched it for Android https://goo.gl/MZpjf9
I'm really proud of my non tech friends because they withstood my complaining about the sourcecode and learned a lot of new thing these past months!!! It was a pleasure making this with them..... I know that the game is simple and it could have been done in much shorter time, but part of the expirience is fun and making things happen with your friends!!!

(https://devrant.com/rants/1629853/...) An update to my rant.

So my cool team lead and a fellow dev are putting down their papers next week.So thats 3 folks out of your team of 5 leaving . Lets see how our manager handles this by hiring more underpaid interns half of whose work I did and ends up telling me its not "talent" that matters but your "Attitude" .Well fuck your attitude Mr.manager I've already got 3 offers.

I had originally written a rant, asking about workflows. It then devolved into something much worse > Reddit-like taunting and whining.

Reference rant(https://devrant.com/rants/1554055/...)

Now before I go any further, yes I fell into his trap and sort of got taunted him back. Ill take half of the blame and hate that it might deserve.

So new question, why do people start off reading a rant (I thought my rant was a genuine question) and immediately enter a dick fighting contest? - myself included

In reply to this:
https://devrant.com/rants/260590/...

As a senior dev for over 13 years, I will break you point by point in the most realistic way, so you don't get in troubles for following internet boring paternal advices.

1) False. Being go-ahead, pro active and prone to learn is a good thing in most places.
This doesn't mean being an entitled asshole, but standing for yourself (don't get put down and used to do shit for others, or it will become the routine) and show good learning and exploration skills will definitely put you under a good light.
2)False. 2 things to check:
a) if the guy over you is an entitled asshole who thinkg you're going to steal his job and will try to sabotage you or not answer acting annoyed, or if it's a cool guy.
Choose wisely your questions and put them all togheter. Don't be that guy that fires questions in crumbles, one every 2 minutes.
Put them togheter and try to work out the obvious and what can be done through google or chatgpt by yourself. Then collect the hard ones for the experienced guy and ask them all at once. He's been put over you to help you.

3) Idiotic. NO.
Working code = good code. It's always been like this.
If you follow this idiotic advice you will annoy everyone.
The thing about renaming variables and crap it's called a standard. Most company will have a document with one if there is a need to follow it.
What remains are common programming conventions that everyone mostly follows.

Else you'll end up getting crazy at all the rules and small conventions and will start to do messy hot spaghetti code filled with syntactic sugar that no one likes, included yourself.

4)LMAO.
This mostly never happens (seniors send to juniors) in real life.
But it happens on the other side (junior code gets reviewed).
He must either be a crap programmer or stopped learning years ago(?)

5) This is absolutely true.
Programming is not a forgiving job if you're not honest.
Covering up mess in programming is mostly impossible, expecially when git and all that stuff with your name on it came out.
Be honest, admit your faults, ask if not sure.
Code is code, if it's wrong it won't work magically and sooner or later it will fire back.

6)Somewhat true, but it all depends on the deadline you're given and the complexity of the logic to be implemented.
If very complex you have to divide an conquer (usually)

7)LMAO, this one might be true for multi billionaire companies with thousand of employees.
Normal companies rarely do that because it's a waste of time. They pass knowledge by word or with concise documentation that later gets explained by seniors or TL's to the devs.
Try following this and as a junior:
1) you will have written shit docs and wasted time
2) you will come up to the devs at the deadline with half of the code done and them saying wtf who told you to do that

8) See? What an oxymoron ahahah
Look at point 3 of this guy than re-read this.
This alone should prove you that I'm right for everything else.

9) Half true.
Watch your ass. You need to understand what you're going to put yourself into.
If it's some unknown deep sea shit, with no documentations whatsoever you will end up with a sore ass and pulling your hair finding crumbles of code that make that unknown thing work.
Believe me and not him.
I have been there. To say one, I've been doing some high level project for using powerful RFID reading antennas for doing large warehouse inventory with high speed (instead of counting manually or scanning pieces, the put rfid tags inside the boxes and pass a scanner between shelves, reading all the inventory).
I had to deal with all the RFID protocol, the math behind radio waves (yes, knowing it will let you configure them more efficently and avoid conflicts), know a whole new SDK from them I've never used again (useless knowledge = time wasted and no resume worthy material for your next job) and so on.
It was a grueling, hair pulling, horrible experience that brought me nothing in return execpt the skill of accepting and embracing the pain of such experiences.

And I can go on with other stories. Horror Stories.
If it's something that is doable but it's complex, hard or just interesting, go for it. Expecially if the tech involved is something marketable.

10) Yes, and you can't stop learning, expecially now that AI will start to cover more and more of our work.

I starting developing my skills to a pro level from 1 year and half from now. My skillset is focused on Backend Development + Data Science(Specially Deep Learning), some sort of Machine Learning Engineer. I fill my github with personal projects the last 5 months, and im currently working on a very exciting project that involves all of my skills, its about Developing and deploy a Deep Learning Model for Image Deblurring.

I started to look for work two months to now. I applied to dozens of jobs at startups, no response. I changed my strategy a bit, focusing on early stage startups that dont have infinite money for pay all that senior devs, nothing, not even that startups wish to have me in their teams. I even applied to 2 or 3 and claim to do the job for little payment, arguing im not going for money but experience, nothing. I never got a reply back, not an interview, the few that reach back(like 3, from 3 or 4 dozen of startups), was just for say their are not interested on me.

This is frustrating, what i do on my days is just push forward my personal projects without rest. I will be broke in a few months from now if i dont get a job, im still young, i have 21 years, but i dont have economic support from parents anymore(they are already broke). Truly dont know what to do. Currently my brother is helping me with the money, but he will broke in few months as i say.

The worst of all this case is that i feel capable of get things done, i have skills and i trust in myself. This is not about me having doubts about my skills, but about startups that dont care, they are not interested in me, and the other worst thing is that my profile is in high demand, at least on startups, they always seek for backend devs with Machine Learning knowledge. Im nothing for them, i only want to land that first job, but seems to be impossible.

For add to this situation, im from south america, Venezuela, and im only able to get a remote job, because in my country basically has no Tech Industry, just Agencies everywhere underpaying devs, that as extent, dont care about my profile too!!! this is ridiculous, not even that almost dead Agencies that contract devs for very little payment in my country are interested in me! As extra, my economic situation dont allows me to reallocate, i simple cant afford that. planning to do it, but after land some job for a few months. Anyways coronavirus seems to finally set remote work as the default, maybe this is not a huge factor right now.

I try to find job as freelancer, i check the freelancer sites(Freelancer, Guru and so on) every week more or less, but at least from what i see, there is no Backend-Only gigs for Python Devs, They always ask for Fullstack developers, and Machine Learning gigs i dont even mention them.

Maybe im missing something obvious, but feel incredible that someone that has skills is not capable of land even a freelancer job. Maybe im blind, or maybe im asking too much(I feel the latter is not the case). Or maybe im overestimating my self? i think around that time to time, but is not possible, i have knowledge of Rest/GraphQL APIs Development using frameworks like Flask or DJango(But i like Flask more than DJango, i feel awesome with its microframework approach). Familiarized with containerization and Docker. I can mention knowledge about SQL and DBs(PostgreSQL), ORMs(SQLAlchemy), Open Auth, CI/CD, Unit Testing, Git, Soft DevOps Skills, Design Patterns like MVC or MTV, Serverless Environments, Deep Learning Solutions, end to end: Data Gathering, Preprocessing, Data Analysis, Model Architecture Design, Training and Finetunning. Im familiarized with SotA techniques widely used now days, GANs, Transformers, Residual Networks, U-Nets, Sequence Data, Image Data or high Dimensional Data, Data Augmentation, Regularization, Dropout, All kind of loss functions and Non Linear functions. My toolset is based around Python, with Tensorflow as the main framework, supported by other libraries like pandas, numpy and other Data Science oriented utils.

I know lot of stuff, is not that enough for get a Junior Level underpaid job? truly dont get it, what is required for get a job? not even enough for get an interview?

I have some dev friends and everyone seems to be able to land jobs, why im not landing even an interview?

I will keep pushing my Dev career, is that or starve to death. But i will love to read your suggestions! how i can approach this?

i will leave here my relevant social presence:

https://linkedin.com/in/...
https://github.com/ElPapi42

Thanks in advance!