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 critical vulnerability was detected in Electron and I urge all the devRantron users to update their app manually.

Please go to https://www.devrantron.com get the latest version which has the necessary patches.

Due to a request, we added compact mode in the app, which can be used to view a distraction-free mode of the UI. Notifications screen is a little bit more readable now. The read notifications are now greyed out.

Again, the auto update will not work for this version. Please manually update as soon as possible.

For Windows driver update, found a great (open source) tool to update or install missing drivers.

https://sdi-tool.org/

My dell laptop (Windows 10) screen used to go blank or some bubble used to appear may times a day. Used Dell driver update tool, no update, says all driver up to date.

Then used Snappy Driver Installer tool, which detected my laptop details correctly.

Then it showed that my display driver was almost a year old and there were couple of updates, latest being just last month. In addition to that, there were 30+ updates on disk drivers, networking, sensors, bluetooth, audio etc.

First updated my display driver, upon success, slowly updated the rest of it. Now, the system worked entire day without any issue. Also, my laptop fan used to run full speed seems to have slowed down.

Also, my external monitor clarity has improved.

ps: worked for me, but be careful. Check it thoroughly before updating, update only those drivers which are giving trouble and there are no updated drivers available from windows or manufacturers.

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...

EoS1: This is the continuation of my previous rant, "The Ballad of The Six Witchers and The Undocumented Java Tool". Catch the first part here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The Undocumented Java Tool, created by Those Who Came Before to fight the great battles of the past, is a swift beast. It reaches systems unknown and impacts many processes, unbeknownst even to said processes' masters. All from within it's lair, a foggy Windows Server swamp of moldy data streams and boggy flows.

One of The Six Witchers, the Wild One, scouted ahead to map the input and output data streams of the Unmapped Data Swamp. Accompanied only by his animal familiars, NetCat and WireShark.

Two others, bold and adventurous, raised their decompiling blades against the Undocumented Java Tool beast itself, to uncover it's data processing secrets.

Another of the witchers, of dark complexion and smooth speak, followed the data upstream to find where the fuck the limited excel sheets that feeds The Beast comes from, since it's handlers only know that "every other day a new one appears on this shared active directory location". WTF do people often have NPC-levels of unawareness about their own fucking jobs?!?!

The other witchers left to tend to the Burn-Rate Bonfire, for The Sprint is dark and full of terrors, and some bigwigs always manage to shoehorn their whims/unrelated stories into a otherwise lean sprint.

At the dawn of the new year, the witchers reconvened. "The Beast breathes a currency conversion API" - said The Wild One - "And it's claws and fangs strike mostly at two independent JIRA clusters, sometimes upserting issues. It uses a company-deprecated API to send emails. We're in deep shit."

"I've found The Source of Fucking Excel Sheets" - said the smooth witcher - "It is The Temple of Cash-Flow, where the priests weave the Tapestry of Transactions. Our Fucking Excel Sheets are but a snapshot of the latest updates on the balance of some billing accounts. I spoke with one of the priestesses, and she told me that The Oracle (DB) would be able to provide us with The Data directly, if we were to learn the way of the ODBC and the Query"

"We stroke at the beast" - said the bold and adventurous witchers, now deserving of the bragging rights to be called The Butchers of Jarfile - "It is actually fewer than twenty classes and modules. Most are API-drivers. And less than 40% of the code is ever even fucking used! We found fucking JIRA API tokens and URIs hard-coded. And it is all synchronous and monolithic - no wonder it takes almost 20 hours to run a single fucking excel sheet".

Together, the witchers figured out that each new billing account were morphed by The Beast into a new JIRA issue, if none was open yet for it. Transactions were used to update the outstanding balance on the issues regarding the billing accounts. The currency conversion API was used too often, and it's purpose was only to give a rough estimate of the total balance in each Jira issue in USD, since each issue could have transactions in several currencies. The Beast would consume the Excel sheet, do some cryptic transformations on it, and for each resulting line access the currency API and upsert a JIRA issue. The secrets of those transformations were still hidden from the witchers. When and why would The Beast send emails, was still a mistery.

As the Witchers Council approached an end and all were armed with knowledge and information, they decided on the next steps.
The Wild Witcher, known in every tavern in the land and by the sea, would create a connector to The Red Port of Redis, where every currency conversion is already updated by other processes and can be quickly retrieved inside the VPC. The Greenhorn Witcher is to follow him and build an offline process to update balances in JIRA issues.
The Butchers of Jarfile were to build The Juggler, an automation that should be able to receive a parquet file with an insertion plan and asynchronously update the JIRA API with scores of concurrent requests.
The Smooth Witcher, proud of his new lead, was to build The Oracle Watch, an order that would guard the Oracle (DB) at the Temple of Cash-Flow and report every qualifying transaction to parquet files in AWS S3. The Data would then be pushed to cross The Event Bridge into The Cluster of Sparks and Storms.
This Witcher Who Writes is to ride the Elephant of Hadoop into The Cluster of Sparks an Storms, to weave the signs of Map and Reduce and with speed and precision transform The Data into The Insertion Plan.
However, how exactly is The Data to be transformed is not yet known.

Will the Witchers be able to build The Data's New Path? Will they figure out the mysterious transformation? Will they discover the Undocumented Java Tool's secrets on notifying customers and aggregating data?

This story is still afoot. Only the future will tell, and I will keep you posted.

DevRant-Stats Site Update:
Made some changes.

After a long time with no updates, I decided to finish up my DevRant-Stats Project and do all of my Todos.

First, I added a way to request adding a user if he is not found. (Just search for your name, wait, then click "OK")
So even non-DevRant++ are now able to see their stats.
I also added @dfox and @trogus, though there is not a lot of interesting data yet...

Second, I added a "Details" section and changed the "Other" section a bit. For example I'm using an image for "Latest Rant" and other stuff.

Link: https://devrant-stats.github.io/

Just check it out!
Have fun!
~ Skayo

So recently a 0-day exploit was discovered in WP plugin Kaswara Modern WP Bakery Page (https://zdnet.com/article/...).

A customer's shared hosting space was taken down (about 6 websites) after this vulnerability had been exploited and although we removed the malicious code, & changed credentials the hosting company demands we update ALL Wordpress plugins to latest AND provide them a virus scan report of our local PC before putting the webspace back online??? WTF???

That just strikes me as outrageous. Thoughts?

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 created Syzer⚡ a cli tool that updates all of your npm dependencies at one go.

Repo: 🚀
https://github.com/RocktimSaikia/...

The reasons behind building this: 📝
1) I personally hate updating my project dependencies manually.
2) There are other similar libraries that do the same thing but I tried one and too much config. I had to specify the package.json file to update it. then what was the point of using that library. So ended up creating one myself.
3) 'npm update' already exists I know but it does not update the package.json file with the latest version tags.

For more info on how the use the tool check it's README instructions. 👋

So... our software is... really old. Part of it was built 20 years ago in Delphi 6 and is still used to this day. It's an automation tool, which supports some scripting... In WSH. Meaning, it only supports JScript (that's right, not javascript, just JScript, the 1998 version), VBScript, and through the use of activex, Python or Perl.

And even our *newer* software, built a couple years ago, just released an update where the HTML rendering engine was updated... to Gecko 38, the version from 3 years ago. And the JavaScript engine is Rhino, the "old" one now replaced by Nashorn a few years back, and barely updated since.

But... there is *some* light on the horizon. The very newest automation tool now has a new plugin, which is based in NodeJS. Having just installed this newer version, I looked in the files to find the nodejs.exe executable... to find that it's on version 8.9.4. Ok it's not precisely the "latest" version, but knowing the history of development for these things I almost expected node 0.10.

It's great news in all this ancient technology I have to deal with. When's the *last* time you made an HTTP request using this code?

var http = new ActiveXObject("WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5.1");
http.open('GET', 'http://example.com/', false);

DEAR NON TECHNICAL 'IT' PERSON, JUST CONSUME THE FUCKING DATA!!!!

Continuation of this:
https://devrant.com/rants/3319553/...

So essentially my theory was correct that their concern about data not being up to date is almost certianly ... the spreadsheet is old, not the data.... but I'm up against this wall of a god damn "IT PERSON" who has no technical or logic skills, but for some reason this person doesn't think "man I'm confused, I should talk to my other IT people" rather they just eat my time with vague and weird requests that they express with NO PRECISION WHATSOEVER and arbitrary hold ups and etc.

Like it's pretty damn obvious your spreadsheet was likely created before you got the latest update, it's not a mystery how this might happen. But god damn I tell them to tell me or go find out when the spreadsheet was generated and nothing happens.

Meanwhile their other IT people 'cleaned the database' and now a bunch of records are missing and they want me to just rando update a list of records. Like wtf is 'clean the database' all about!?!?!?

I'm all "hey how about I send you all records between these dates and now we're sure you've got all the records you need up to date and I'll send you my usual updates a couple times a day using the usual parameters".

But this customer is all "oh man that's a lot of records", what even is that?

It's like maybe 10k fucking records at most. Are you loading this in MS Access or something (I really don't know MS Access limits, just picking an old weird system) and it's choking??!?! Just fucking take the data and stick it in the damn database, how much trouble can it be?!!?!?

Side theory: I kinda wonder if after they put it in the DB every time someone wants the data they have some API on their end that is just "HERE"S ALL THE FUCKING DATA" and their client application chokes and that's why there's a concern about database size with these guys.

I also wonder if their whole 'it's out of date' shit is actually them not updating records properly and they're sort of grooming the DB size to manage all these bad choices....

Having said all that, it makes a lot more sense to me how we get our customers. Like we do a lot of customer sends us their data and we feed it back to them after doing surprisingly basic stuff ever to it... like guies your own tools do th---- wait never mind....

Update to watchRant!
(my second and probably last post about it)

watchRant client is mostly complete now!

Added: logging in, notif page, ranting, commenting, ++/-- of rants, search, amoled theme,

A surprise me btn for a random Rant (why is this not in the official app @_@, its in their API)

And the best:

Sick rant animation of the client of @Simmorsal!!
https://github.com/SIMMORSAL/...

some things are still missing: voting comments, stories page, comment/ranting with images (nobody takes images with a watch haha) ...

watchRant is also available on the PlayStore now (as sideloading to a watch isnt very convinient), but the latest updates will always be on github first

For context: https://devrant.com/rants/6340608/...

i am feeling angry and frustrated. not sure if it's a person ,or codebase or this bloody job. i have been into the company for 8 months and i feel like someone taking a lot of load while not getting enough team support to do it or any appreciation if i do it right.

i am not a senior by designation, but i do think my manager and my seniors have got their work easy when they see my work . like for eg, if on first release, they told me that i have to update unit tests and documentation, then on every subsequent release i did them by default and mentioning that with a small tick .

but they sure as hell don't make my work easy for me. their codebase is shitty and they don't give me KT, rather expect me to read everything on my own, understand on my own and then do everything on my own, then raise a pr , then merge that pr (once reviewed) , then create a release, then update the docs and finally publish the release and send the notification to the team
well fine, as a beginner dev, i think that's a good exercise, but if not in the coding step, their intervention would be needed in other steps like reviewing merging and releasing. but for those steps they again cause unnecessary delay. my senior is so shitty guy, he will just reply to any of my message after 2-3 hours

and his pr review process is also frustrating. he will keep me on call while reviewing each and every file of my pr and then suggest changes. that's good i guess, but why tf do you need to suggest something every fucking time? if i am doing such a shitty coding that you want me to redo some approach that i thought was correct , why don't you intervene beforehand? when i was messaging you for advice and when you ignored me for 3 hours? another eg : check my comment on root's rant https://devrant.com/rants/5845126/ (am talking about my tl there but he's also similar)

the tasks they give are also very frustrating. i am an android dev by profession, my previous company was a b2c edtech app that used kotlin, java11, a proper hierarchy and other latest Android advancements.

this company's main Android product is a java sdk that other android apps uses. the java code is verbose , repetitive and with a messed up architecture. for one api, the client is able to attach a listener to some service that is 4 layers down the hierarchy , while got other api, the client provides a listener which is kept as a weak reference while internal listeners come back with the values and update this weak reference . neither my team lead nor my seniors have been able to answer about logic for seperation among various files/classes/internal classes and unnecessary division of code makes me puke.

so by now you might have an idea of my situation: ugly codebase, unavailable/ignorant codeowners (my sr and TL) and tight deadlines.
but i haven't told you about the tasks, coz they get even more shittier

- in addition to adding features/ maintaining this horrible codebase , i would sometimes get task to fix queries by client . note that we have tons of customer representatives that would easily get those stupid queries resolced if they did their job correctly

- we also have hybrid and 3rd party sdks like react, flutter etc in total 7 hybrid sdks which uses this Android library as a dependency and have a wrapper written on its public facing apis in an equally horrible code style. that i have to maintain. i did not got much time/kt to learn these techs, but once my sr. half heartedly explained the code and now every thing about those awful sdls is my responsibility. thank god they don't give me the ios and web SDK too

- the worst is the shitty user side docs. I don't know what shit is going there, but we got like 4 people in the docs team and they are supposed to maintain the documentation of sdk, client side. however they have rasied 20 tickets about 20 pages for me to add more stuff there. like what are you guys supposed to do? we create the changelog, release notes , comments in pr , comments in codebase , test cases, test scenarios, fucking working sample apps and their code bases... then why tf are we supposed to do the documentation on an html based website too?? can't you just have a basic knowledge of running the sample, reading the docs and understand what is going around? do i need to be a master of english too in addition to being a frustrated coder?

just.... fml

update : we are at hr round baby!!!

part 1 : https://devrant.com/rants/5528056/...

part 2 (in comments) : https://devrant.com/rants/5550145/...

the tech market is crazy mann! it's one of the top indie fintech companies in our country and has a great valuation.
i totally felt that they i am crashing the interviews , and am seriously not trying to be humble. before the dsa round , i was trying to mug up how insertion sort works 🥲

--------

now my dilemma is should i switch if i get the offer. in a summary:

current company:
- small valuation but profitable (haven't picked funding for last 3 years , so poast valuation is some double digit million $, but can easily be a unicorn company)
- very major b2b player in my country. almost all unicorns (including this fintech company) and some major MNCs are their client and they have recently acquired a few other companies of us and eu too, making them- a decent global player

- meh work : i love being a cutting edge performer in android but here we make sdks that need to support even legacy banking apps. so tech stack is a lot of verbose java and daily routine includes making very minor changes to actual code and more towards adding tests , maintaining wrapper sdks in react/cordova/unity etc, checking client side code etc.

- awesome work life balance : since work is shit and i am fast enough, i am usually working only 2-4 hours a day. i joined gym, got into shape , and have already vsited 5 places in last 6 months, and i am a guy who didn't used to have time even on sundays. here, we get mote paid leaves than what i would usually need.

- learning opportunities: not exactly from the company codebase, but they provide unlimited access to various course learning platforms like linkedin learning, udemy and others, so i joined some web dev baches and i now know decent frontend too. plus those hybrid sdks also give a light context to new things

new company :
- positives : multi billion valuation, one of the top players in fintech , have been mostly profitable ( except a few quarters)
- positive : b2c so its (hopefully) going to put me back into racing shoes with kotlin, jetpack and latest libraries.
- more $$$ for your boy :)

- negetive : they seem to be on hiring spree and am afraid to junp ship after seeing the recent coinbase layoffs. fintech is scary these days

- negetive : if they are hiring people like me, then then they are probably hiring people worse than me 😂. although thats not my concern what my main concer is how they interviewed. they have hired a 3rd party company that takes interviews of people FOR THEM! i find that extremely impolite, like they don't even wanna spare their devs to hire people they are gonna work with. i find this a toxic, robotic culture and if these are the people in there then i would have a terrible time finding some buddy engineer or some helpful senior.

- negetive : most probably a bad wlb : i worked for an year for a fast paced b2c edtech startup. no matter how old these are , b2c are always shipping new stuff and are therefore hectic. i don't like the boredom here but i would miss the free time to workout :(

so ... any thoughts about it?

I recently released my latest UI, Auth, & CRUD scaffolding package called Laravel Livewire UI.

This package provides Laravel Livewire & Bootstrap UI, Auth, & CRUD scaffolding commands to make your development speeds blazing fast. With it, you can generate full, preconfigured Bootstrap UI, complete Auth scaffolding including password resets and profile updating, and Create, Read, Update, and Delete operations. The CRUD files even have searching, sorting, and filtering. This package also comes with full PWA capabilities.

- Demo Video: https://youtube.com/watch/...
- Github Repo: https://github.com/bastinald/...

Thanks for your time.