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

A note on devRant community etiquette. I've seen some behavior lately that I want to just mention since it goes against the rules of our community. We've specifically built moderation tools into upvoting and downvoting, and that is how all content should be moderated.

Commenting on rants that you don't think should be posted only gives them more exposure and unfortunately at times people trying to moderate content via comments and rants have gotten abusive towards other members. On the contrary, I've yet to see any of the people these select few members accuse of "ruining the community" act hostile towards anyone.

So with that said, I wanted to make sure this policy is visible, because commenting on other people's rants, especially in a hostile way to stop them from posting, is bannable and we really don't want to see it. Like mentioned before, that's what downvoting is for and it's much more effective since it doesn't boost the content like adding a comment does.

We take content quality seriously and while we haven't been able to eliminate reposts completely, we've made a lot of progress. For directly reposted content, we added the repost detector (https://devrant.io/rants/425054/...) and are still working to improve that and appreciate any feedback/ideas for it.

Like any community on the internet, devRant will always have some reposts and it will always have some content you really don't like. That's what comes along with being an open platform with very little moderation. We get requests to moderate more heavily, but we don't like censoring recent rants and don't plan to do that.

Most of the times people who repost content or an image didn't realize it was already posted. Not everyone uses recent sort and almost always they have no ill intent.

Anyway, feel free to let me know if you have any questions and feedback is always welcome.

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

One of my favorite aspects of devRant has always been getting to learn more about the awesome people who use it. Beyond just the awesome stories posted by many here, one of my favorite ways to learn about and feel connected to the people here has always been desk/setup reveals. I personally love seeing different kinds of setups from all over the world, knowing that’s what the people here use to do their work and compute in general.

As an experiment, we want to try a few different things to highlight desk/setup/remote coding location posts. First, we’ve created the first devRant Instagram account, which is completely focused on developer desks/setups/workstations/remote coding. Please check it out here and follow: https://www.instagram.com/devdesks/

I want to use the account to bring more attention to the wide assortment of setups the awesome members of the devRant community post from all over the world. We’ll promote cool desk/setup/remote work images that are posted on devRant to the Instagram account for more exposure/additional audience.

Beyond that, I also want to try to come up with a way to better organize all of the desk/setup posts on devRant and encourage more of them. One kind we don’t see that often that I personally really enjoy is people coding with their laptops in locations that show the culture of their country or something special about the region they are from. Personally, I’m going to try to post some of those for where I live and work.

So how can you help with this effort? It’s easy! We encourage people to post their setups/working remotely pics and we will start featuring them on the Instagram account and hopefully elsewhere in the devRant app for some increased visibility/searchabilty over what we have now (since pics are kind of hard to search).

Also, we plan to make the weekly rant this week “post your setup,” so maybe wait until then to post, and you can work now on getting that awesome shot :) I know a lot of people here love photography like I do, so I think that part is fun too.

Please let me know if you have any ideas or questions about this, and I’m looking forward to seeing the desks/setups of many more devRanters in the next few days!

P.S. not a requirement, but one thing I think makes these photos better looking through a lot of them is when there is code visible in some way.

I wanted to post a note on devRant community etiquette and rule-breaking behavior we’ve been seeing lately to make clear it will not be tolerated. This is pretty much a rehash of this rant, https://devrant.com/rants/609739/... and also our official rules which I highly encourage people to read: https://devrant.com/rules

I’ve noticed an influx of a select group of members, mostly older users, expressing a distain towards other users or declaring content they dislike “shouldn’t be posted”, “please stop”, etc. If you find yourself about to post that, as per our rules, please don’t. It blatantly violates our rules and we are going to start cracking down on it much more. Whether you have 30k+ points or 10, we will apply the rules fairly to everyone and not give breaks to specific people, which admittedly I’ve done in the past.

If we see this behavior in rants/comments first we will give a warning (and the rant/comment will be deleted) and the next offense is a ban.

A valid question (even though I’ve answered it before) might be why does this need to be a rule? Simply put, it’s a rule for a number of reasons: posts like described try to inflict one’s will upon the entire community (even though we have a Democrat voting process...), they create confusion (almost every time they try to sound official, ex. “Stop doing this”), and beyond those two main reasons, they literally accomplish nothing because they offer no constructive methods of achieving what’s being requested, and only a fraction of the community will actually see it.

Here’s an example of what’s not allowed and what is allowed:

- Allowed: posting an issue on our GitHub issue tracker saying “I really dislike seeing this type of rant in my algo feed, here’s some ideas I have to improve the algo and add more personalization so I can see what I want.”

- Allowed: posting on GitHub issue tracker: “I found this awesome image similarly algo that I think can improve the ‘repost check feature’ - you guys should check it out and see if it might be good”

- Not allowed: “Omg stop shitposting windows update rants and Linux rants I hate them. Go post this type of rant because that’s what everyone really wants to see.”

One is constructive an the other is merely an opinion expressed as an enforcement of a self-made rule on the community and tries to tell other people how they should use devRant.

I cringe when people tell others how to use devRant because without fail when I see those posts, I go through that person’s rant/comment history and I nearly always see them using devRant in some kind of way I disagree with or isn’t exactly what I like to see. But that’s OK. I understand I’m not going to enjoy everything posted and I’m also not going to agree with everything posted. But I think it’s fair for those same people to then lecture on what isn’t appropriate to post on devRant, and it’s even more silly when their posts are sometimes irrelevant to development and the posts they are complaining about are relevant.

In the end, based on the large majority of feedback we get, we want to make devRant a place where everyone feels comfortable expressing themselves and doesn’t have to think about possibly getting ridiculed every time they post and that don’t have people trying to dictate what kind of ideas they are allowed to post. We also realize there’s types of content people don’t enjoy, but telling others not to post it is not the solution. We will soon be launching post type filters that will make filtering rants by post type possible.

Please let me know if you have any questions and thanks for reading.

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!

INTRODUCING:

---

SYNTAX HIGHLIGHT BOT

---

I have lots of ideas.
This was one of them.

Last week I was playing around with https://carbon.now.sh and found it quite cool!
Then I thought: https://carbon.now.sh supports Twitter. Cool. But what about devRant?
So yeah, then I got the idea: A devRant Bot that generates https://carbon.now.sh images!

Now, 4 days and 800 lines of code later, the bot is ready!
I even had to rewrite the notification checking code 4 times, because none of them worked perfectly...
But on the other hand, the final solution is so good that I want to keep it a secret for now ;D

---

HOW TO USE:

All you need to do is to mention the bot!
Example:

<rant>
@highlight
console.log('Hello World!');
</rant>

The bot then generates your syntax highlighted code (as an image) and posts it as comment a few seconds later.
Everything before the "@highlight" will be ignored!
Example:

<rant>
Look at this code:

@highlight
function add(a) {
return a + 1;
}
</rant>

Here, "Look at this code:" will not be included in the syntax highlighted code.
If the comment text ends right after the "@highlight", the bot wont reply, btw.

---

THEME SELECTION:

That's not all!
You can even select the theme for your syntax highlighted code!
Just go to my other rant and read the instructions!
The theme will be used for every image the bot generates for you!

Link:
https://devrant.com/rants/2178551

---

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments!
My creator (and father thanks to @rutee07), @Skayo, will try to answer all of them!

P.S.: Speaking of @rutee07: I'm a girl. (Also thanks to him)

Fuck brand builders, or, how I learned to start giving a shit and love devrant.

Brand builders are people who generally have very little experience and are attempting to obfuscate their dearth of ability behind a wall of non-academic content generation. Subscribe, like, build a following and everyone will happily overlook the fact that your primary contribution to society is spreading facile content that further obfuscates the need for fundamentals. Their carefully crafted presence is designed promote themselves and their success while chipping away at the apparent value of professional ability. At one point, I thought medium would be the bottom of the barrel; a glorified blog that provides people with scant knowledge, little experience and routinely low integrity a platform to build an echo chamber of replayed or copied content, techno-mysticism and best-practice-superstition they mistake for a brand in an environment where there's little chance of peer review. I thought it couldn't get any worse.

Then I found dev.to

Dev.to is what happens when all the absence of ability and skills insecurity on the internet gets together to form a censorship mob to ensure that no criticism, reality or peer review will ever filter into the ramblings of people intent on forever remaining at the peak of the dunning-kreuger curve. It's the long tail of YMCA trophy culture.

Take for example this article:

https://dev.to/davidepacilio/...

It's a shit post listicle by someone claiming to be "senior," who confidently states that "you are only as good as the tools you use." Meanwhile all the great minds of history are giving him the side-eye because they understand tools are just a magnifier of ability. If you're an amazing carpenter, power tools will help you produce at an exponential rate. If you're a shitty carpenter, your work will still be shit, there will just be more of it. The actual phrase that's being butchered here is "you're only as good as the tools you create." There's no moral superiority to be had in being dependent on a tool, that's just a crutch. A true expert or professional is someone who can create tools to aid in their craft. Being a professional is having a thorough enough understanding of the thing you are doing so as to be able to craft force multipliers that make your work easier, not just someone who uses them.

Ok, so what?

I'm sure he's a plenty fine human to grab drinks with, no ill will to him as a human. That said, were you to comment something to that effect on dev.to, you'd be reported by all the hangers-on pretty much immediately, regardless of how much complimentary padding and passive, welcoming language you wrap your message in. The problem with a bunch of weak people ganging up on the voice of reason and deciding they don't want things like constructive criticism, peer review, academic process or the scientific method is, after you remove all of that, you're just left with a formless sea of ideas and thoughts with no categorization, no order. You find a lot of opinions and nothing to challenge them and thereby are left with no mechanism for strong ideas to rise to the top. In that system, the "correct" ideas are by default those posited by the strongest personality.

We all need some degree of positive reinforcement. We also need to be smacked upside the head when we're totally off in the weeds. It's all about balance. The forums of ancient Greece weren't filled with people fervently agreeing with one another and shouting down new ideas en masse. We need discourse, not demagoguery.

Dev.to, medium, etc are all the fast fashion of the tech industry. Personally, I'd prefer something designed to last a little longer.

I've kinda ghosted DevRant so here's an update:

VueJS is pretty good and I'm happy using it, but it seems I need to start with React soon to gain more business partnerships :( I'm down to learn React, but I'd rather jump into Typescript or stick with Vue.

Webpack is cool and I like it more than my previous Gulp implementation.

Docker has become much more usable in the last 2 years, but it's still garbage on Windows/Mac when running an application that runs on Symfony...without docker-sync. File interactions are just too slow for some of my enterprise apps. docker-sync was a life-saver.

I wish I had swapped ALL links to XHR requests long ago. This pseudo-SPA architecture that I've got now (still server-side rendered) is pretty good. It allows my server to do what servers do best, while eliminating the overhead of reloading CSS/JS on every request. I wrote an ES6 component for this: https://github.com/HTMLGuyLLC/... - Frankly, I could give a shit if you think it's dumb or hate it or think I'm dumb, but I'd love to hear any ideas for improving it (it's open source for a reason). I've been told my script is super helpful for people who have Shopify sites and can't change the backend. I use it to modernize older apps.

ContentBuilder.js has improved a ton in the last year and they're having a sale that ends today if you have a need for something like that, take a look: https://innovastudio.com/content-bu...

I bought and returned a 2019 Macbook pro with i9. I'll stick with my 2015 until we see what's in store for 2020. Apple has really stopped making great products ever since Jobs died, and I can't imagine that he was THAT important to the company. Any idiot on the street can you tell you several ways they could improve the latest models...for instance, how about feedback when you click buttons in the touchbar? How about a skinnier trackpad so your wrists aren't constantly on it? How about always-available audio and brightness buttons? How about better ports...How about a bezel-less screen? How about better arrow keys so you can easily click the up arrow without hitting shift all the time? How about a keyboard that doesn't suck? I did love touch ID though, and the laptop was much lighter.

The Logitech MX Master 3 mouse was just released. I love my 2s, so I just ordered it. We'll see how it is!

PHPStorm still hasn't fixed a couple things that are bothering me with the terminal: can't reorder tabs with drag and drop, tabs are saved but don't reconnect to the server so the title is wrong if you reopen a project and forget that the terminal tabs are from your last session and no longer connected. I've accidentally tried to run scripts locally that were meant for the server more than once...

I just found out this exists: https://caniuse.email/

I'm going to be looking into Kubernetes soon. I keep seeing the name (docker for mac, digitalocean) so I'm curious.

AWS S3 Glacier is still a bitch to work with in 2019...wtf? Having to setup a Python script with a bunch of dependencies in order to remove all items in a vault before you can delete it is dumb. It's like they said "how can we make it difficult for people to remove shit so we can keep charging them forever?". I finally removed almost 2TB of data, but my computer had to run that script for a day....so dumb...

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.

We're declaring an active season of events at dR Community Server! 🎉 https://devrant.com/collabs/...

Join our guild of 100+ members to get hold of fresh ideas and game events tailored for active devRant community. You are welcome to organize your own events in here.

Showcasing notable userscripts or projects every week. Cohesive threads and always enough channels for everything you like, all await you at dRCS. 😄

Devrant bug report:

Every 5th or so time I open the app it opens on this one rant from last week. Really strange.

(if it helps: this rant: https://devrant.com/rants/960649/...)