EDIT: since this announcement, collabs have been made free to post for all devRant members!

Introducing two big new devRant features!

First, the one @trogus and I are most excited about - Collabs!

Collabs are an easy way to start projects or work on existing projects with the awesome members of the devRant community. You can post a collab listing for the awesome open source project you started that could use some more contributors, that fun idea you have for a brand new project, or really anything you want to gather some fellow devs for. We think it will be a lot of fun.

Collabs also is a devRant first - it's our first paid feature. For each 2 week collab posting, we're charging $14.99. But we wanted to make sure to thank devRant users who have been with us for a while and anyone who contributes often, so anyone with 2,000 points or higher (now or in the future) gets one free collab listing!

The main reason we see collabs as a great first paid feature is because requiring payment or 2,000 points serves to be a slight barrier in posting a collab. We think for collaborations to be successful it's important to have some way to keep out listings where the poster has no intent of following through and we hope this is a good start to doing that.

NOTE: if the collab you are looking to create is devRant-centric (ex. a devRant Chrome extension), we will give you a free credit especially for that so you don't have to pay or use your earned free one. Just contact us (info@devrant.io) if your project falls into that category.

In addition, after tons of demand from the community, you can now change your username and email address! One important note is that you only get to change your username one time every 6 months, so use it cautiously :) You can access this feature in the "more" tab, then settings, then "Edit username or email."

If you have any questions or feedback about any of this, just let us know! We hope everyone enjoys :)

Worst exp. on a collab/group project?

Had a few, here is one.

Worked with a dev team (of two devs) in Norway to begin collaboration on providing a portal into our system (placing orders, retrieving customer info, inventory control, etc)

They spoke very good English, but motivation was the problem. Start the day around 10:00AM...take a two hour lunch...ended the day at, if I was lucky, 4:00PM (relative to Norway time). Response time to questions took days, sometimes weeks. We used Skype, which helped, but everything was "Yea...I'll do that tomorrow...waiting on X....I have a wedding to go to, so I'll finish my part next week."

I didn't care so much, I had other projects to do, but the stakeholders pounded me almost everyday demanding a progress report (why aren't you done yet...etc..etc.)
The badgering got so bad I told the project owner (a VP) if he wanted this project done by the end of the year, the company would have to fly me to Norway so I personally push things along.
When real money was on the line, he decided patience was warranted.

A 3 month project turned into 9, and during a phone meeting with the CEO in December
O: "Thanks guys, this project is going great. We'll talk again in February. Bye."
PM: "Whoa...what! February!"
<sounding puzzled>
O: "Um..yes? It's Christmas time. Don't you Americans take off for Christmas?"
PM: "Yes, but not until Christmas. Its only December 12th. Your taking the whole month of December and January for Christmas?"
O:"Yes, of course. You Americans work too hard. You should come over here and see how we celebrate. Takes about a month so we can ease back into the flow of things."
<Jack is the VP>
PM: "Jack wanted this project completed by the end of the year, that is what everyone agreed to."
O:"Yes, I suppose, but my plane is waiting on me. Not to worry, everything will be fine."
<ceo hangs up>
PM: "Oh shit..oh shit..oh shit. What are you going to do!?"
Me: "Me!?..not a darn thing. Better go talk with Jeff."
<Jeff is the VP>
J: "This is unacceptable. You promised this project would only take a few months. I told you there would be consequences for not meeting the deadline."
PM:"But..but...its not our fault."
J: "I don't care about fault. I care about responsibility. I've never had to fire anyone for not meeting a deadline, but .."
Me: "Jeff, they are in Norway and no one is working this project for the next two months. You've known for months about them dragging their asses on this project. We're ready to go. Services have been tested and deployed. Accounting has all the payment routing ready. Only piece missing is theirs."
J: "Oh. OK. Great job guys. I guess we'll delay this project until February."
<leave the office>
PM: "Holy shit I'm glad you were there. I thought I was fired."
Me: "Yea, and that prick would have done it not giving a crap that it's Christmas."
<fast forward to Feb>
O: "Our service provider fell through, so I'm hosting with another company. You guys know PHP? Perl? I don't know what they called it, but it sounded so cool I bought the company."
PM: "You bought what? Are we still working with Z and B?"
O:"Yea, sort of. How's your German? New guy only speaks German."
PM: "Um, uh... no one here speaks German"
O:"Not to worry, I speak German, French, and Italian. I'll be your translator."
PM: "What? French and Italian?"
O: "On my trip to France I connected with a importer who then got me in touch with international shipper in Italy. I flew over there and met a couple really smart guys than can help us out. My new guy only speaks German, J only speaks French, and R speaks Italian, Russian, and a little English. Not to worry, I'm full time on this project. You have my full attention."

We believe the CEO has/had some serious mental issues, including some ADD. He bailed within the first month (took another vacation to Sweden to do some fishing) and left me using Google Translate to coordinate the project. Luckily, by the end, the Norwegian company hired a contractor from England who spoke German and hobbled together the final integration.

So, how many are rushing to get 2000 ++ to unlock the New Collab feature in devrant....!!!!!

Hmmm. @dfox, there seems to be a problem. I click on a rant, and it takes me to a collab page. Is that a new feature? :)

How we click notifs in devRant.

1-1. SOMEONE mentioned you in a comment!

1-2. SOMEONE commented on your rant!

2. SOMEONE ++'d your rant!

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999. SOMEONE ++'d your comment!

1000. One (or more) new comments on a rant/collab you commented on!

Sorry creators, but..... (silence, drops mic)

Am I blind of am I unable to post a collab? I rarely use the web interface because I can never find something. but when Im on the collab page I should be able to post a new collab right???

Apple acting like real time collab is new technology. Deary me

Why is there always one asshole!

New job just a month in, had a meeting where we could bring up improvements and put them on cards.

I brought up the idea of using slack so we could collaborate better or maybe a collab space. We all have our own offices or share with high walls.

The guy running the meeting has the same title as me said we never had that before, are you unhappy with yiur onboarding?

Slack or a messaging app is industry standard for even none tech companies. I was polite and said it was just a suggestion and it might make it easier to get help for the new people if there is a group chat.

Also brought up using a formatting standard so code reviews are spent commenting on spacing. I said we could you prettier to implement that and just pick a standard.

He said that was an issue because people were not paying attention before they pushed the code.

I am sorry I am new so I am rewriting and rewriting code all the time. I was to format on save and not spend time fucking formatting!

I could use a package before since it I formatted it would look like a bunch of fucking changes in git.

Why make things harder? Part of the meeting was how to get code done and PR’ed faster so it gets to the testers. Autoformatting shit would help.

More a positive rant...
Just casually looked into an invitation to a collab tool my workplace set up for discussing optimizations of workflows, internal collabs, communication, yada yada...
Just to figure out, that there's A LOT of room for improvement being discussed and new ideas related to our work. Which is fucking great! Like "Hey we could maybe introduce A/B testing for our software" or "We should change the way our CI/CD works".
One of the best things I've seen so far: "We should do smth about (react) component XY, as it currently holds many configurable parameters for look and feel with too many possibilities" ... these components are like each 1 big file or so, that covers EVERY possibility. I had a feeling in my gut that some things were built quite complicated, but originally with a good idea/intention in mind. I thought that I just needed time to get used to new things. Now I know that I need to learn nevertheless but that things NEED improvement and that others agree on that, too.
I think this is a good sign when a company tries to reflect on itself to become better.

the new Nike x Space Cadet Pinball collab looks stunning

I want to start a devRoulette project: basically something telling you what to code, in what language, and with some challenges if specified. Feel free to put your suggestions here :)

NEW: @SADAVA, who has been bashed quite a lot for their initiative of building demos for my project, didn't mean harm. In fact, I might consider a collab, so yeah :)

# This isn't THAT bad, but since I never had any collab before this one, this is the worst so far

I'm in a web development school where we need to do a yearly project. At the beginning, we started with the idea of doing an online wallet that would handle crypto-currencied (#blockchains), and other currencies too.
On the paper that sounds good, but the dude decided to create a NodeJS server api, and let's be honest, this was a gas factory. I couldn't help him because he was too fast in his ideas, and the third member was a bit more useful because he was the one creating the mobile app, so all he needed was an url that the dude couln't manage to create.

After a few weeks he started over the project, then over again a few weeks later, before coming to us and saying it was too difficult. We said "yeah, I mean you're own your own since the beginning, no wonders!" "Uh do you guys care if we change the whole project to do something else? Like a CV library"

Went a moment where he tried to over sell some incredible (read "overly common") features that already existed 10 years ago on some famous websites (ie. Monster), and he then eventually told me that this idea came from his new job, and that they needed this library. So we would have to work for his company for free. Nice.
The third guy and me came with a new idea (image recognition with IA and stuff), and we saw the dude maybe 5 times the whole week while we're supposed to work together

Sort of devRant meta question, I'm new here. What's a Collab and how does one create it?

I have been using CakePHP 1.3 and 2.x fore some years. I built two custom platforms on them that we used for almost every project at work, and also some of my freelance ones.

We've built all kind of stuff, from basic CMS to large scale CRM/ERP systems, and it held it's own!

But now I wanna build another one! :D

I wanna build a platform on CakePHP 3.x fore sume time at work, but the constant flow of projects leaves little time for this.

And I am not talking about the shitty stuff like the sorry attempts you can find oh GitHub right now, that I never even managed to use once for a real project (I really tired!), I am talking about a real platform, for real world projects, with a real world interface, and real world functionallity, for real world use cases!

I was thinking to start an open source project, but I never managed one so I have some concerns...

Like it will not get any contributors and I will eventually do it on my own anyway, or like it WILL get traction and I will not be able to manage the project, or the community.

I am the head of the dev dept at work, but open source seems like a whole new ball game for me...

Anyway, what do you people think? Would you work on something like that? Would you use it? Should I create a GitHub project and add a collab? Or is it doomed already?

!rant

Any1 wanna collab on the new dota 2 bot API?

The scripting language is Lua.

#Suphle Rant 2: Michael's obduration

For the uninitiated, Suphle is a PHP framework I built. This is the 2nd installment in my rants on here about it.

Some backstory: A friend and I go back ~5 years. Let's call him Michael. He was CTO of the company we worked at. After his emigration, they seem to have taught him some new stack and he needed somewhere to practise it on. That stack was Spring Boot and Angular. He and his pals convinced product owner at our workplace to rebuild the project (after 2+ years of active development) from scratch using these new techs. One thing led to the other, and I left the place after some months.

Fast forward a year later, dude hits me up to broach an incoming gig he wants us to collab on. Asks where I'm at now, and I reply I took the time off to build Suphle. Told him it's done already and it contains features from Spring, Rust, Nest and Rails; basically, I fixed everything they claimed makes PHP nonviable for enterprise software, added features from those frameworks that would attract a neutral party. Dude didn't even give me audience. I only asked him to look at the repo's readme to see what it does. That's faster than reading the tests (since the docs are still in progress). He stopped responding.

He's only the second person who has contacted me for a gig since I left. Both former colleagues. Both think lowly of PHP, ended up losing my best shot at earning a nickel while away from employed labour. It definitely feels like shooting myself in the foot.

I should take up his offer, get some extra money to stay afloat until Suphle's release. But he's adamant I use Spring. Even though Laravel is the ghetto, I would grudgingly return to it than spend another part of my life fighting to get the most basic functionality up and running without a migraine in Spring. This is a framework without an official documentation. You either have to rely on baeldung or mushroom blogs. Then I have to put up with mongodb (or nosql, in short).

I want to build a project I'm confident and proud about delivering, one certified by automated tests for it, something with an architecture I've studied extensively before arriving at. Somewhere to apply all the research that was brainstormed before this iteration of Suphle was built.
I want autonomy, not to argue over things I'm sure about. He denied me this when we worked together. I may not mind swallowing them for the money, but a return to amateur mode in Spring is something I hope I never get to experience soon

So, I'm wondering: if his reaction reflects the general impression PHP has among developers globally, it means I've built a castle on a sinking ship. If someone who can vouch for me as a professional would prefer not to have anything to do with PHP despite my reassurance it'll be difficult to convince others within and beyond that there could be a more equipped alternative to their staple tool. Reminds me of the time the orchestra played to their deaths while the titanic sank