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Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
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Search - "open-source fun"
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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 :)52 -
Hey everyone,
We have a few pieces of news we're very excited to share with everyone today. Apologies for the long post, but there's a lot to cover!
First, as some of you might have already seen, we just launched the "subscribed" tab in the devRant app on iOS and Android. This feature shows you a feed of the most recent rant posts, likes, and comments from all of the people you subscribe to. This activity feed is updated in real-time (although you have to manually refresh it right now), so you can quickly see the latest activity. Additionally, the feed also shows recommended users (based on your tastes) that you might want to subscribe to. We think both of these aspects of the feed will greatly improve the devRant content discovery experience.
This new feature leads directly into this next announcement. Tim (@trogus) and I just launched a public SaaS API service that powers the features above (and can power many more use-cases across recommendations and activity feeds, with more to come). The service is called Pipeless (https://pipeless.io) and it is currently live (beta), and we encourage everyone to check it out. All feedback is greatly appreciated. It is called Pipeless because it removes the need to create complicated pipelines to power features/algorithms, by instead utilizing the flexibility of graph databases.
Pipeless was born out of the years of experience Tim and I have had working on devRant and from the desire we've seen from the community to have more insight into our technology. One of my favorite (and earliest) devRant memories is from around when we launched, and we instantly had many questions from the community about what tech stack we were using. That interest is what encouraged us to create the "about" page in the app that gives an overview of what technologies we use for devRant.
Since launch, the biggest technology powering devRant has always been our graph database. It's been fun discussing that technology with many of you. Now, we're excited to bring this technology to everyone in the form of a very simple REST API that you can use to quickly build projects that include real-time recommendations and activity feeds. Tim and I are really looking forward to hopefully seeing members of the community make really cool and unique things with the API.
Pipeless has a free plan where you get 75,000 API calls/month and 75,000 items stored. We think this is a solid amount of calls/storage to test out and even build cool projects/features with the API. Additionally, as a thanks for continued support, for devRant++ subscribers who were subscribed before this announcement was posted, we will give some bonus calls/data storage. If you'd like that special bonus, you can just let me know in the comments (as long as your devRant email is the same as Pipeless account email) or feel free to email me (david@hexicallabs.com).
Lastly, and also related, we think Pipeless is going to help us fulfill one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from the community. Now, it is going to be our goal to open source the various components of devRant. Although there’s been a few reasons stated in the past for why we haven’t done that, one of the biggest reasons was always the highly proprietary and complicated nature of our backend storage systems. But now, with Pipeless, it will allow us to start moving data there, and then everyone has access to the same system/technology that is powering the devRant backend. The first step for this transition was building the new “subscribed” feed completely on top of Pipeless. We will be following up with more details about this open sourcing effort soon, and we’re very excited for it and we think the community will be too.
Anyway, thank you for reading this and we are really looking forward to everyone’s feedback and seeing what members of the community create with the service. If you’re looking for a very simple way to get started, we have a full sample dataset (1 click to import!) with a tutorial that Tim put together (https://docs.pipeless.io/docs/...) and a full dev portal/documentation (https://docs.pipeless.io).
Let us know if you have any questions and thanks everyone!
- David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus)53 -
Fun fact: Michael Widenius named "MySQL" after his daughter My. When MySQL was acquired by sun, he decided to start a new open source database, "MariaDB", named after his second daughter Maria.
This guy is (partially) responsible for two of the largest databasesystems in the world.
Imagine his daughters apply for a database engineering job one day. During application process: "One of the largest databases in the world was named after me..." 😂19 -
1. If your contract allows it (and it should), get more involved in public dev community. Your employer benefits greatly from making a small closed source core product, with a giant open source ecosystem around it. Write public articles. Working in a community larger than one single business is fun.
2. Start a company coding club, a "labs" division, work in a slightly more exotic language. Great if your employer gives you time, but using some of your own is worth it too. Work on non critical tools, creative experiments. Sometimes you stumble onto incredibly valuable ideas which would never have popped up if you had strictly followed stakeholder requirements.
3. Listen to your body. If you feel restless, go for a run. If you feel tired, take a nap. If you're stuck, wander around the company. If you feel down, go find a place with more than a dozen trees. And always have a notepad nearby for doodling!5 -
Do you agree to this rule given by my company ?
"Employees are not allowed to create any sort of library for any language after or during working hours, whether for personal or company projects. As they might somehow expose companies code to the open-source world."
Personally, I created quite much (not that much) of library , I created for fun, today I was told to delete ALL , so those who use my package , Im sorry :(74 -
WTF is up with open-source projects using emojis in their commit messages... FUCKING emojis..
I get it, programming is fun and a hobby to many, but can we also keep at least a minimum level of professionalism here.
WTF is a wheelchair or bento emoji at the beginning of a commit message supposed to mean? Why the hell even bother to use it in the first place? There is no fucking reason for this retarded shit.
Is this what happens when activist developers get out of their way to make programming "inclusive"?
It is your personal project and so if you want to use emojis it is OK, I respect that (not really) but I can't trust your code, your commitment, or the quality of your work if I see those dumb Unicode characters there.
Git commit messages are not a game. Be playful with comments in code or your readme.md file but git messages should be a clear reflection of the changes not what a teenager's phone vomited on the keyboard.rant stop this shit git commit messages source control keep emojis out of git emoji open-source github34 -
It was 1999. I was just starting my first real job as a programmer for a major insurance company. We were working on code that would screen scrape legacy mainframe data output and convert it to a web-based UI. REALLY stupid project approach I had no input on. I happened to find a programmer in Germany who had released his code in the public domain that would help with making a certain conversion task easier. I downloaded his code and put it to work.
During a code review, a programmer who was probably about 60 asked me where I got the code and what it was doing. I didn't even get to the part about what it was doing because he made fun of me so badly, in a fake German accent in front of a room full of non-programmers, for using code that today is no big deal due to the prevalence of open source. I just clammed up in humiliation because he got everyone laughing at me. His philosophy was if we didn't buy it or write it ourselves, we had no business using it.
I guess I was just ahead of my time?6 -
Alright so listen to this. I was working on a project, it was a fork of another github repo. So the project is mainly based in PHP, simple enough right?
Anyways I have my version working and I put it up as a website and am doing fairly well with it. I was trying to advertise it a bit on reddit ( pay attention to the trying ) then someone comes along and asks how I made it and all that.
Just trying to be kind I tell them what I used and all that to make it. Then they come back a few hours later explaining that they are trying to make their own version for "fun". Then they proceed to explain that they are having some issues with it, it obviously is something in the back-end (they must've fucked up something).
So I politely ask them to show me the code so I can help them fix it.
He refuses.
So we exchanged a bit. What his excuse for not showing me his code ( Keep in mind he is also taking this from an open-source software same as me he has simply broken something and can't fix it himself ) is he doesn't want me stealing his ideas...
I nearly snapped when he did that, I had already seen the site he made, from that end it wasn't anymore spectacular than mine and no serious changes seemed to have occurred. The best part is that it was broken. He asked for my help and refused to let me see the code so I told him that I simply couldn't help him fix it then. He goes and is just going alright.
Next he then asks me how I solved this issue and that issue and he wanted the code that I used to fix each of these little issues. Pretty much to the point that it would've been a clone of my site. So I just didn't give him anything.
Didn't hear from him for a few hours, next thing I know he messages me asking if he can fix my site so it is mobile friendly...First off my site is mobile friendly and works pretty well. I have been spending a lot more quality time to work on this than him.
Moral of the story is, some people are retards.5 -
I'm a freelance web developer and I normally work on small to medium sized websites, 9 out 10 times based on WordPress and 10 out 10 times with a limited budget.
8 out of 10 times the sites content will be updated by someone with at best casual knowledge in website management.
Say what you will about WP but it's my bread and butter and it works great for just these kinds of websites; where the cost is a dealbreaker and the end product should be as user friendly as a standard word processor.
No, you probably wouldn't build a control panel for the next space shuttle or an online bank in WordPress, but I rarely need to concern myself with those kinds of projects so that really doesn't affect me.
Pretty much the same reason I have a Kia car even though I wouldn't win a Formula 1 race with it.
I for one am grateful that there's an open source tool available to my clients that more than adequately meets their needs (that's also fun to work with and build custom solutions on for me as a developer).7 -
I am having fun building a captured wifi portal. It shows up as "Virus Distribution Point" as an open AP. If you connect to the AP it brings up a page that looks like the picture.
It does nothing except show the page. The page will eventually do some limited javascript animation to make it look like it is doing something.
Right now it is an embedded webpage. Strings in a source file. Eventually I would like to turn this into a product of sorts that would make it easy for someone to use for advertising/pranks. So I expect I will need to create some sort of simple toolset for updating the pages and changing the SSID and the passcode (if any).8 -
“I Pay $900 A Month for student loans.”
Not sure why there’s a video about this but let’s watch it...
*Sad music is playing*
“My name is _____ and I pay $900 a month for student loans..”
Yeah so what?
*Sad music continues*
??
*Woman makes a call and asks about when they’re going to make a student loan reform aggressively*
????
Then I realized my family was eligible for low income and I received Cal and Pell grants to pay for my tuition and living.
Then I realized that the salary for my computer science degree has numbed me to a point where $900 a month doesn’t seem too bad. Or awful. I mean I just leased a new car for my mom! And didn’t hesitate (only when having fun negotiating though).
Back then, I would be shocked. But it’s a surreal feeling to see now that I don’t. I was literally confused at the basis of this video. And now I’m surprised at my disconnect from it.
I also realized that they make videos based on how society should react to it. Am I an outcast to society because of this? Why am I not reacting the same way?
Maybe society (nowadays) would disdain me because I’ve come into high income like we all will because of our passion (and the demand for it).
But fuck society. It’s full of the very same people who use technology each and every day. Protesting for things they found trending on Twitter. The ones who refused to learn even though it’s a huge part of their lives. They’re the ones holding us back for an Engel’s Technological Utopia (idk if I’m even correct about the philosopher but anyways..)
We’re above them. We make things they’ll use and in massive numbers.
Don’t let them dictate what you should like. How you should act. Whether or not you should feel lonely while they’re posting pictures of fun times on Facebook.
We should be the ones doing that. Because we are the ones doing that.
That’s why we’re given the best to perform what we love most.
So devs, continue what you’re doing. Small or big, you’re still driving the world forward. Opening pull requests and contributing to open source projects. Answering questions on Stack Overflow not only for the person intended but for the beginner or even experienced professional who may stumble upon it later in a Google search.
And be highly rewarded for it. How society feels doesn’t matter any more when it comes to your passion. You’re important. Your work helps others in ways you can’t even imagine. We’re like one big fucking hivemind of engineers with the accessibility of the internet.
I love drinking on a Sunday!12 -
Okay guys, this is it!
Today was my final day at my current employer. I am on vacation next week, and will return to my previous employer on January the 2nd.
So I am going back to full time C/C++ coding on Linux. My machines will, once again, all have Gentoo Linux on them, while the servers run Debian. (Or Devuan if I can help it.)
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So what have I learned in my 15 months stint as a C++ Qt5 developer on Windows 10 using Visual Studio 2017?
1. VS2017 is the best ever.
Although I am a Linux guy, I have owned all Visual C++/Studio versions since Visual C++ 6 (1999) - if only to use for cross-platform projects in a Windows VM.
2. I love Qt5, even on Windows!
And QtDesigner is a far better tool than I thought. On Linux I rarely had to design GUIs, so I was happily surprised.
3. GUI apps are always inferior to CLI.
Whenever a collegue of mine and me had worked on the same parts in the same libraries, and hit the inevitable merge conflict resolving session, we played a game: Who would push first? Him, with TortoiseGit and BeyondCompare? Or me, with MinTTY and kdiff3?
Surprise! I always won! 😁
4. Only shortly into Application Development for Windows with Visual Studio, I started to miss the fun it is to code on Linux for Linux.
No matter how much I like VS2017, I really miss Code::Blocks!
5. Big software suites (2,792 files) are interesting, but I prefer libraries and frameworks to work on.
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For future reference, I'll answer a possible question I may have in the future about Windows 10: What did I use to mod/pimp it?
1. 7+ Taskbar Tweaker
https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tw...
2. AeroGlass
http://www.glass8.eu/
3. Classic Start (Now: Open-Shell-Menu)
https://github.com/Open-Shell/...
4. f.lux
https://justgetflux.com/
5. ImDisk
https://sourceforge.net/projects/...
6. Kate
Enhanced text editor I like a lot more than notepad++. Aaaand it has a "vim-mode". 👍
https://kate-editor.org/
7. kdiff3
Three way diff viewer, that can resolve most merge conflicts on its own. Its keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-1|2|3 ; ctrl-PgDn) let you fly through your files.
http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/
8. Link Shell Extensions
Support hard links, symbolic links, junctions and much more right from the explorer via right-click-menu.
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/...
9. Rainmeter
Neither as beautiful as Conky, nor as easy to configure or flexible. But it does its job.
https://www.rainmeter.net/
10 WinAeroTweaker
https://winaero.com/comment.php/...
Of course this wasn't everything. I also pimped Visual Studio quite heavily. Sam question from my future self: What did I do?
1 AStyle Extension
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
2 Better Comments
Simple patche to make different comment styles look different. Like obsolete ones being showed striked through, or important ones in bold red and such stuff.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
3 CodeMaid
Open Source AddOn to clean up source code. Supports C#, C++, F#, VB, PHP, PowerShell, R, JSON, XAML, XML, ASP, HTML, CSS, LESS, SCSS, JavaScript and TypeScript.
http://www.codemaid.net/
4 Atomineer Pro Documentation
Alright, it is commercial. But there is not another tool that can keep doxygen style comments updated. Without this, you have to do it by hand.
https://www.atomineerutils.com/
5 Highlight all occurrences of selected word++
Select a word, and all similar get highlighted. VS could do this on its own, but is restricted to keywords.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
6 Hot Commands for Visual Studio
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
7 Viasfora
This ingenious invention colorizes brackets (aka "Rainbow brackets") and makes their inner space visible on demand. Very useful if you have to deal with complex flows.
https://viasfora.com/
8 VSColorOutput
Come on! 2018 and Visual Studio still outputs monochromatically?
http://mike-ward.net/vscoloroutput/
That's it, folks.
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No matter how much fun it will be to do full time Linux C/C++ coding, and reverse engineering of WORM file systems and proprietary containers and databases, the thing I am most looking forward to is quite mundane: I can do what the fuck I want!
Being stuck in a project? No problem, any of my own projects is just a 'git clone' away. (Or fetch/pull more likely... 😜)
Here I am leaving a place where gitlab.com, github.com and sourceforge.net are blocked.
But I will also miss my collegues here. I know it.
Well, part of the game I guess?7 -
[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.
Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)
It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)
First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.
The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target
All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...
Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.
"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.
---
I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.
Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.
I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )
The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.
---
It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.
The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.
The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.
---
Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.
Cheers!4 -
Lots of fun open source stuff, but I had a lot of fun working on a survey taking m&m dispenser. The goal was to encourage students to answer survey questions that would help the faculty get a better idea of what the students found most valuable (different things they wanted to learn, classes they found useless, etc.). So me and another student built this :) Its a node server running on an Intel Galileo, which served up an admin and survey interface using React. When a student answered a survey question, a servo would turn a gear, which interfaced with a rack and pinion that had two little pits in it. When it would slide under the jar, two m&ms would fill the pits, then the rack and pinion would push them out. Then we had a webcam hooked up to the end of it that would compare the colors of the m&ms to see if they were the same. If they were the same, the student would get more m&ms. The gear pieces were 3D printed.
We could never get the webcam stuff to work right with the Galileo because OpenCV (the computer vision library we were using to interact with the webcam) could not be built/compiled on such a specific version of Linux. Later, I was able to do it with a RaspberryPi, but never got it reintegrated.5 -
I contributed to my first open source project on GitHub. It is so much better and fun to do. Why have I not been doing this since 🤔😊😁
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Software Devs are less supportive than the community tries to convey. They're also part of the most self-deluded and obnoxious crowd that exists on earth.
Someone saying they don't enjoy coding 24/7 outside of work? You actually enjoy totally different hobbies that have next to nothing to do with coding?
- Shitty developer, you should probably work elsewhere. Maybe flipping burgers.
"Coding in <Framework X> is SO friggin' easy. You're basically subhuman garbage if you can't learn it within a month!"
Watch some YouTube Videos with the "Freelancer Success Stories" of dudes that haven't - apparently coded, ever - and started to code late in life and tell you how perseverance and learning brings the success and yet you never see any repos of those guys. You see those guys mostly go on for up to half an hour to regurgitate some hot garbage you can read up within two minutes yourself from ANY coding blog.
You're not using a macbook to develop?
- "Oooof, man! How can you?"
You don't really like "Popular Framework X"?
- Especially when it comes to Frontend Frameworks prepare to either die on the hill of your beliefs or die a futile and slow death when people - more or less - snarkily try to dissect your opinion in order to try - again, more or less - to hide their own bias. Because don't forget, your opinion is OBJECTIVELY wrong and you simply happen to a garbage developer for (dis-)liking something.
You DO like "Popular Framework X"?
- Well, rinse and repeat basically.
You struggle to get a new job?
- All your fault. You clearly didn't spend enough time coding; you should have at least 12 Open-Source Projects with at least 100k downloads the week.
There is actually a whole lot more, but I feel I'm basically done with software dev. Software development is neither creative nor terribly fun. I'm just angry at myself that I switched careers for the money.20 -
If you can be locked out of it remotely, you don't own it.
On May 3rd, 2019, the Microsoft-resembling extension signature system of Mozilla malfunctioned, which locked out all Firefox users out of their browsing extensions for that day, without an override option. Obviously, it is claimed to be "for our own protection". Pretext-o-meter over 9000!
BMW has locked heated seats, a physical interior feature of their vehicles, behind a subscription wall. This both means one has to routinely spend time and effort renewing it, and it can be terminated remotely. Even if BMW promises never to do it, it is a technical possibility. You are in effect a tenant in a car you paid for. Now imagine your BMW refused to drive unless you install a software update. You are one rage-quitting employee at BMW headquarters away from getting stuck on a side of a road. Then you're stuck in an expensive BMW while watching others in their decade-old VW Golf's driving past you. Or perhaps not, since other stuck BMWs would cause traffic jams.
Perhaps this horror scenario needs to happen once so people finally realize what it means if they can be locked out of their product whenever the vendor feels like it.
Some software becomes inaccessible and forces the user to update, even though they could work perfectly well. An example is the pre-installed Samsung QuickConnect app. It's a system app like the Wi-Fi (WLAN) and Bluetooth settings. There is a pop-up that reads "Update Quick connect", "A new version is available. Update now?"; when declining, the app closes. Updating requires having a Samsung account to access the Galaxy app store, and creating such requires providing personally identifiable details.
Imagine the Bluetooth and WiFi configuration locking out the user because an update is available, then ask for personal details. Ugh.
The WhatsApp messenger also routinely locks out users until they update. Perhaps messaging would cease to work due to API changes made by the service provider (Meta, inc.), however, that still does not excuse locking users out of their existing offline messages. Telegram does it the right way: it still lets the user access the messages.
"A retailer cannot decide that you were licensing your clothes and come knocking at your door to collect them. So, why is it that when a product is digital there is such a double standard? The money you spend on these products is no less real than the money you spend on clothes." – Android Authority ( https://androidauthority.com/digita... ).
A really bad scenario would be if your "smart" home refused to heat up in winter due to "a firmware update is available!" or "unable to verify your subscription". Then all you can do is hope that any "dumb" device like an oven heats up without asking itself whether it should or not. And if that is not available, one might have to fall back on a portable space heater, a hair dryer or a toaster. Sounds fun, huh? Not.
Cloud services (Google, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.) can, by design, lock out the user, since they run on the computers of the service provider. However, remotely taking away things one paid for or has installed on ones own computer/smartphone violates a sacred consumer right.
This is yet another benefit of open-source software: someone with programming and compiling experience can free the code from locks.
I don't care for which "good purpose" these kill switches exist. The fact that something you paid for or installed locally on your device can be remotely disabled is dystopian and inexcuseable.16 -
!rant
Monday morning panic...the dreaded question.
Random office colleague: "Do anything fun over the weekend?"
Me internally: Fuck...what did I do? Did I do anything at all? I mowed the yard...played video games...spent 3 hours looking at some random open source package I gave up trying to compile. All that is boring though. Was there nothing exciting I can brag about? Fuck...oh wait. I went to a huge theme park Saturday. Yeah that's cool enough to mention!
Me: "No not really"1 -
Project incoming!
Would anyone actually be interested in POC'ing an open source alternative to devRant? Unfortunately it seems that this platform is going to the ground with little to no maintenance and even pipeless.io giving 502s.
I wouldn't expect anything real proper of it but could be a fun community project. Would require some planning though and probably more than just the odd person contributing.
Context in the middle of this thread: https://devrant.com/rants/9889646/...39 -
I love open source and all that fun stuff but I am very unimpressed by having to use GNU/Linux based OS after the last fuck up... the lack of games, stuff that actually works, the almost constant need to compile something and the need to have DDG open at all times because something broke. I mean why the fuck do I need to install libcurl3:i386(for 32 bit programs and games) if there is already libcurl4 and why the actual fuck does it conflict?!... Why the fuck do I need to glue together and compile drivers for my printer?! And they only have "beta support" so like half of the functions that the printer would normally have... Why the fuck don't any games work? Witcher 2? Nope, you click launch and the launcher just closes itself. osu!lazor? Nope, the game will run but only as a process in the background, no window will open no matter what I do. StarCraft: Brood War? Nope, Wine hates the battle.net client and running it in a VM is a really bad idea, the game flickers like crazy... Any other games? Pretty much out of luck... I would really like to play KCD but I doubt it would be playable...rant wine compile all the things glue together your own printer driver open source stuff breaks ubuntu os duckduckgo vm gnu/linux games24
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Hello fellas! 👋
I recently told you that I’m planning to pull out Chaaat – a fully open source messenger that doesn’t track you and doesn’t share your data: https://devrant.com/rants/1549251/....
The project is also mentioned here: https://devrant.com/rants/1570178/...
So, I’m here to tell you good news – a great developer, @not-a-muggle, decided to join me, and now we made a team!
I also made some conversations and acquired “chaaat” name from another team on Heroku, so now we have consistent domain name on both Heroku and GitHub Pages.
We have Trello board with very well described tasks almost anyone can do. We also have Slack to have both business and free conversations.
If you’re seeking a place to contribute and gain some NodeJS / React / PWA / WebRTC experience with detailed code review from experienced developer, just mention me here or shoot me an email on hello@miloslav.website. Provide your email so I’ll be able to contact you.
Our main goals are:
1. Have fun and some experience
2. Make it to Chrome Experiments mention
Marketing/advertising help is much appreciated.
Feel free to email me anytime!8 -
About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.
When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.
My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"
Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.
Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.
The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.
Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now. -
!rant
Just bumped into a repo that produces a mock shell with commands as a 404 page. Thought it might fit with someone's project.
It still has bugs (not work on mobile Safari) but that's an opportunity to get involved in an open-source project, no?
http://jotaen.net/jBZuH/...2 -
When I was 12 I created my own LEGO manuals and monopoly boardgame variants.
When I was 14 and into gaming I had fun playing with a Q3 level editor for Wolfenstein (GtkRadiant), and drew boardgame maps.
When I was 16 I translated the game battledawn.com to French for in-game currency in return.
When I was 18 I fiddled with texture packs for Minecraft and got interested in Total War mods.
When I was 20 I met a student who studied webdev & design. I was so excited about basic HTML, CSS and later JS and PHP, that I read and learnt some every evening (and even failed an exam because I was learning PHP until 5AM)
I always wanted to use my skills to create something of use to others. Open-source is the perfect avenue for that and is also what enabled me to get here in the first place. And though I m've been professionally employed as dev since 2015, only the last 2 yrs I finally consider myself skilled enough to give back something of quality :)2 -
go fuck yourself with your fucking communities. i went into computing because i like being left alone. who are all those fucking freaks building their communities? this is capitalism mother fuckers, everybody in the world agreed on it, on each person being an independent individual doing their job to the best possible standard, instead these low-skill low-iq oversocialised sheeple started conglomerate into communities and brainwash everybody that this is what it is about. get stuffed alright. all my life i've been introverted, just leave me alone to write code alright? take my library i don't mind i'll take yours no strings attached, just push the code and forget about it. but no, all these degenerate morons without CS degrees have occupied our safe space, pushed us out of it and just can't get enough of using the buzzword "community-driven" "volunteers" volunteer my ass assholes you can't even make software nobody in real industry needs you because you have no skill at all you learn a bit of js which is any 14-15 yo can do and now think you're some kind of prodigies, unsung heros of humanity who selflessly bring the progress. nothing can be further from the truth - because of you we don't have real software, we don't have investment we don't get no respect everybody walks all over software engineers treating us like shit, there's an entire generation of indoctrinated parasitic scum that believes that software tools is grown for them on trees by some development teams that their are entitled to automatically, because some corporation will eventually support those big projects - yeah does it really happen though - look at svelte, the guy is getting 50k a year when he should be earning at least 500k if he had balls to start a real businesses, but no we are all fucking prostitutes, just slaving away for the army of people we never see. are you out of your mind. this shit should be fucking illegal alright it's modern day slavery innit bruh, if a company wants to pay their engineers to work on open source this is fine, i love open source like java or google closure compiler, but it's real software made by real engineers, but who are all these community freaks who can't spend a 10 seconds on stage in their shitty bogus conferences without ringing the "community" buzzer? you're not my community i fucking hate your guts you're all such dumb womenless imbeciles who justify their lack of social skill by telling themselves that you're doing good by doing open source in your free time - mate nobody gives a shit alrite? don't you want money sex power? you've destroyed everything that was good about good olde open source when it was actually fun, today young people are coerced into slavery at industrial scale, it's literally impossible to make a buck from software as indie unless you build something really big and good, and you can't build anything big without investment and who invests in software nowadays? all the ai "entrepreneurs" are getting fucking golden rained with cash while i have to ask for a 5$ donation? what the actual fuck? who sanctions this? the entire industry is in one collective psychotic delusion, spurred by microsoft who use this army of useful idiots to eliminate all hounour dignity of the profession, drive the abundance and bring about poverty of mind, character, as well as wallet as the natural state of things. fucking amatures of course you love your shitty little communities because you can't achieve anything on your own. you literally have no personality, just one homogenous blob of dumb degenerates who think and act all the same. there used to be a tool called adobe flash builder, i could just buy it, then open and make a web app, all from start to finish in one program, using tutorials of adobe experts on youtube, sure it might have had its pitfals but it was a product - today there's literally no fucking product to make websites. do you people get it? i can't buy a tool that i need to do my job and have to insult myself by downloading some shitty scripts from some shitty unemployed devs and hope my computer doesn't blow up in my face in the process because some freak went off his nut and uploaded some dodgy ass exploit on npm in his package. i really don't like. it's not supposed to be like that. good for me i build by own front/back end. this "community" insanity is just a symptom of industrial degeneration, they try to sell it to us like it's the "bright" communist future but things never been worst, i can't give a shit about functional programming alright i just need to get my job done mate leave me alone you add functional because you don't know how to solve the problem properly, e.g., again adobe flex had mxml where elements had ids and i could just program to id, it was alright but today all this unqualified morons filled the whole space after flash blew up and adobe execs axed flash builder instead of adapting it to js runtime, it was a crime against humanity that set us back to 1000s5
-
Heyyy DevRant Fam! It’s definitely been quite awhile since i have posted in this amazing community and I apologise, i’ve been extremely busy with my uni work and just life caught up to me 😅, also as always I really hope everyone is doing very well wherever you may be as always :-).
I’d love to ask you guys a question that has been on my mind for a while now 😊, I’ve been thinking of making my own password manager for a side/fun project. What I’ve been doing is I’ve found a open source project on github and downloaded it , loaded it up and read through some code, from memory the project is called ‘keepass’ and its written in c++!.
I’d love to get some advice from you guys, how do i go about learning and understanding open source code :-)? What is some advice you can give to me? Anyways I’d be very grateful for any piece of advice :D once again as always hope everyone has an amazing Sunday night and long weekend, wherever you may be!.
Thank you for reading my very long post sorry for rambling on 😅.
Kind regards,
Milo ☺️4 -
Made my first contribution to the Python package index. Contributing to open source has always been fun. DevRants, please check my module that I have contributed. Here is the link to PyPi - https://pypi.org/project/... and GitHub - https://github.com/browserium/...
Please post your feedback and comments so that I can improve my module and have a workaround across all the issues.1 -
!rant
So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.
To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).
I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/
I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.
I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.
But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).
I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.
What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!
Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.
I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.
Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.
What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/
Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.
To Summarize a bit.
It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.
So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.
I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..5 -
I've been developing an application off and on over the past year and a half for fun. Was a good excuse to learn something new.
It is to the point now that it has potential (still needs tons of work) to be much better than several existing applications out there doing the same thing.
I am feeling overwhelmed because I either need to a) seriously invest time into it to make it a fully fledged tool and try to sell it b) open source it and see if other people find it worth working on or c) just abandon it and move on.
Has anyone else been in this type of situation knowing there is potential but honestly may be more than you can do as a single person?7 -
Ability to understand all machine learning models to modify code and those models directly and create better ones every time.
I would take existing ml model, modify it by hand to create better one, win some multimillion dollars competitions and make them open source.
Eventually all recommendation systems, text to speech, speech to text, music generation, movies generation etc would be opensource.
This would either destroy or boost all modern economy but for sure it would make harm to corporations and make them cry.
That would be fun to see.6 -
Data wrangling is messy
I'm doing the vegetation maps for the game today, maybe rivers if it all goes smoothly.
I could probably do it by hand, but theres something like 60-70 ecoregions to chart,
each with their own species, both fauna and flora. And each has an elevation range its
found at in real life, so I want to use the heightmap to dictate that. Who has time for that? It's a lot of manual work.
And the night prior I'm thinking "oh this will be easy."
yeah, no.
(Also why does Devrant have to mangle my line breaks? -_-)
Laid out the requirements, how I could go about it, and the more I look the more involved
it gets.
So what I think I'll do is automate it. I already automated some of the map extraction, so
I don't see why I shouldn't just go the distance.
Also it means, later on, when I have access to better, higher resolution geographic data, updating it will be a smoother process. And even though I'm only interested in flora at the moment, theres no reason I can't reuse the same system to extract fauna information.
Of course in-game design there are some things you'll want to fudge. When the players are exploring outside the rockies in a mountainous area, maybe I still want to spawn the occasional mountain lion as a mid-tier enemy, even though our survivor might be outside the cats natural habitat. This could even be the prelude to a task you have to do, go take care of a dangerous
creature outside its normal hunting range. And who knows why it is there? Wild fire? Hunted by something *more* dangerous? Poaching? Maybe a nuke plant exploded and drove all the wildlife from an adjoining region?
who knows.
Having the extraction mostly automated goes a long way to updating those lists down the road.
But for now, flora.
For deciding plants and other features of the terrain what I can do is:
* rewrite pixeltile to take file names as input,
* along with a series of colors as a key (which are put into a SET to check each pixel against)
* input each region, one at a time, as the key, and the heightmap as the source image
* output only the region in the heightmap that corresponds to the ecoregion in the key.
* write a function to extract the palette from the outputted heightmap. (is this really needed?)
* arrange colors on the bottom or side of the image by hand, along with (in text) the elevation in feet for reference.
For automating this entire process I can go one step further:
* Do this entire process with the key colors I already snagged by hand, outputting region IDs as the file names.
* setup selenium
* selenium opens a link related to each elevation-map of a specific biome, and saves the text links
(so I dont have to hand-open them)
* I'll save the species and text by hand (assuming elevation data isn't listed)
* once I have a list of species and other details, to save them to csv, or json, or another format
* I save the list of species as csv or json or another format.
* then selenium opens this list, opens wikipedia for each, one at a time, and searches the text for elevation
* selenium saves out the species name (or an "unknown") for the species, and elevation, to a text file, along with the biome ID, and maybe the elevation code (from the heightmap) as a number or a color (probably a number, simplifies changing the heightmap later on)
Having done all this, I can start to assign species types, specific world tiles. The outputs for each region act as reference.
The only problem with the existing biome map (you can see it below, its ugly) is that it has a lot of "inbetween" colors. Theres a few things I can do here. I can treat those as a "mixing" between regions, dictating the chance of one biome's plants or the other's spawning. This seems a little complicated and dependent on a scraped together standard rather than actual data. So I'm thinking instead what I'll do is I'll implement biome transitions in code, which makes more sense, and decouples it from relying on the underlaying data. also prevents species and terrain from generating in say, towns on the borders of region, where certain plants or terrain features would be unnatural. Part of what makes an ecoregion unique is that geography has lead to relative isolation and evolutionary development of each region (usually thanks to mountains, rivers, and large impassible expanses like deserts).
Maybe I'll stuff it all into a giant bson file or maybe sqlite. Don't know yet.
As an entry level programmer I may not know what I'm doing, and I may be supposed to be looking for a job, but that won't stop me from procrastinating.
Data wrangling is fun.1 -
Favourite thing you worked on recently?
——
I’m working on server monitoring system. I found that I need to pay for most server monitor services, and ones that are free/open source didn’t sound like they fit my use case (b/c the server i need to monitor is shared,) so I basically said “f*<k it I’ll do it myself.” I find it fun to work on something that I feel the need to make.1 -
Just wrote the first part of what will become a rather large Go project!
Almost the whole thing is gonna be pluggable, which adds an extra challenge, but nevertheless, the is gonna be a fun ride!
Also, it's gonna be Open Source, but until I'm at a reasonably stable version, I'm gonna be leaving it closed. Lmk if you're looking for something to do and want to join, this is gonna be a big project.7 -
So I am considering side games to add my main games. Mini games I guess they are called. I thought it might be fun to have random chessboards in game you can actually play. I wanted to actually have a decent chess engine behind the game. Off the bat I found a GPL one. I think it is designed to be communicated externally. So what does that mean for using it in my game? If I communicate to an external process is this violating GPL? I have no intention of making my game open source. Well it seems this use case is very nuanced:
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/...
The consensus on a lot of these discussions is the scope of the use of the program. Are you bundling for convenience or bundling for intrinsic utility? This is fascinating because using a compiler on a Windows platform could be a possibly violation. That is a proprietary program calling a GPL one. This is actually handled in the GPL as far as I know. So, if I use a GPL engine as a mini game is that the same as a full blown chess game? What if I support 10 different engines in a full blown chess game?
Now to play devil's advocate even further. Are proprietary phone apps that communicate to GPL software that serve data intrinsically linked? The app will not function without the server or computer os the server runs on. A lot of the web tech is largely GPL or has large amount of GPL programs. Should the web code be under GPL? Should the phone app be under GPL? This sounds ridiculous to some degree. But is that the same as bundling a GPL app and communicating to it from the program via network or command line? The phone app depends upon this software.
Now to protect myself I will find a decent chess engine that is either LGPL or something more permissive. I just don't want the hassle. I might make the chess engine use a parameter in case someone else might want a better engine they want to add though. At that point it is the user adding it. Maybe the fact that it would not be the only game in town is a factor as well.
I am also considering bundling python as a whole to get access to better AI tools (python is pretty small compared to game assets). It seems everything is python when it comes to AI. The licensing there is much better though. I would love to play with NLP for commanding npcs.
I am not discussing linking at all, btw.3 -
I'm not that into open source contributions, but the hacktoberfest campaign this year caught my attention. There are so many challenges and events happening... I thought I should give it a try.
So far I got 2 t-shirts and had more fun than I thought.1 -
A shitty platform that, although open source, there is no clearly documented way of setting a development environment for it. This pile of crap states clearly that it does NOT support RTL languages. One of the core business requirements is Arabic support. What to do? Look for other platforms? WRONG!
Base the fucking business on it and ask ME to see why the SQL database is not encoding the Arabic characters correctly and to look into the logs that back-end puked. My expertise is mobile development anyways damnit. Sure the backend code is Java code (Java jokers and haters, not the appropriate place) and I know it but there is no fucking way to test that motherfucker or to build it! No fucking testing server can be made! Only instructions to get a Docker image pulled and set up.
FML.
"This company is a fucking م."
I cannot believe I am so frustrated that I am ending this rant with a fun puzzle.
Hints to help you decipher the quoted sentence:
Hint 1: That Arabic letter is the perfect letter.
Hint 2: You don't need to be an Arab to understand what it means.6 -
Are you out of your free medium articles?😢 My Scrapy is here for the rescue.💸
This is simple application of web scraping, it scrapes the articles of medium and allows you to read or hear the article. If you use this on computer there will be a number of accents in the option.
The audio feature is provided only to the premium medium users, so here comes My Scrapy to save your 5$/month. 💸
.
Tech Stack used :
Python, beautiful soup, Django, speech synthesis
.
PS: This application was built for educational purpose and the source code for this application is not open sourced anywhere.
Fun Fact : You can still read any medium articles if they ask you to upgrade, you must be wondering how? Well, copy the link of the article and browse it in incognito mode on any browser.😂🤣
Try the app and lemme know if you liked it:
https://mymediumscraper.herokuapp.com/...4 -
a little later for wk131 but:
To build a completely open platform for everything we have right now... operating systems, manufacturing etc...
The basic idea being serving a line of products under the platform's branding with an algorithm to control which open source implementation of the underlying architecture is most stable/efficient and keep switching them out. This is incredibly ambitious.
A reward based system to power this based on contributions. Example: if the open platform oled manufacturing industry uses a manufacturing process you came up with ... You get paid until well another person's process is better and it gets switched out.
Ideal modularity tbh.
Switching out parts of apps .For example : if the most efficient map algorithm is created by X it will be used. Payments split up as better forked implementations appear.
It's a thriving fun environment. Fuck job stability. Humans weren't meant to live like that. Hunt an animal today or you won't get food tomorrow.
On the plus side this will close the intellectual gap in the current generation. -
!rant
Soooo, badges. They seem to have some prevalence in the open source community. I'd love to earn some from fedora. One day!
Anyone have any fun ones to show off?2 -
Interesting NY Times article today Saturday March 26 2016 by Markoff and Lohr, "A Race to Take Control of Artificial Intelligence And the Future of Tech". Lots of C levels will read this article and ask CIO if AI on radar. Will fan the fire. Also a lot of VC action. Google TensorFlow open source. Microsoft also all in and of course IBM Watson. Google beat Go grandmaster 4-1, which is tougher than chess program. Something to keep on your radar. Have fun!
-
And so again I'm here asking for your opinions.
My old router (linksys EA6400) had a meltdown yesterday and decided to lose wifi connectivity every 4-5 seconds for 4-5 seconds each time. So it was like 5 ICMP packets pass and then 5 fail, and this pattern held up through the whole day.
Did a hard reset hoping it will help. Little did I know.. Do you even imagine how fun it was setting it up with randomly not working wifi? :D And this router can only be set up over wifi. I had to count seconds in my head predicting when it will start losing packets. Because when it does - the setup fails :)
yayy!!
So I guess it's time to start looking for a new one. I barely use ethernet ports (one for RPi). But I do need a good wifi. AC is a must. AX is not since none of my devices support it. I'd also like it to have open-source firmware, maybe accessible via shell (100% dd-wrt/open-wrt compatible). A USB port would be a plus (for the RPi).
Do you have any suggestions worth looking at?
What do you think about WRT3200ACM MU-MIMO?
Also I came across something called MESH ROUTERS (wtf is that?). http://linuxgizmos.com/low-cost-802.... Is it worth looking at?
What would YOU suggest?4 -
I just ordered a bunch of stickers and a mug, all while a portion of the proceeds go to support open source.
I shamelessly give you my personal kickback link:
http://unixstickers.refr.cc/76TMR8V
They have loads of variety. I'm an Arch Linux guy, so I bought a bunch of that. Even if you don't buy anything, it's fun to look. -
DevGoals 2019
B awsome as usual and chill have fun wth coding not limited to working hours.
Make coding my prority one hobby... Then the rest 😉
Starting wt contributing to an open source project... -
Looking at @striker28 's rant made me think of my time I did my MSc and I think it needs it's own separate rant so here it goes:
So I did an MSc at one of the big league unis in London. First clue was during week 1 where in one of the class a mature student asked whether there would be actual coding during the course. There was an audible gasp from everyone else! Once the lecturer said the unfortunatly they wouldn't be you could hear the sigh of relief from the students...
Next up was all the lectures being placed in the freakin' basement of the university in crap, smelly rooms with annoying ticking A/Cs whereas all the social siences, business and other subjects had lecture halls and classrooms above ground. The contempt for CS from the university's direction was palpable.
Then there was the relegation to the theory-only (i.e. abstract with pen/paper) "tutorial" to the hand of T/As with bugger-all teaching experience. In short most were terrible and should've found a way to abscond themselved from this obligation which was part of the terms of their phd grants unfortunatly.
Further into the course there was the "group project". Oh boy! Out of the 5 in the group my now mature student friend and I were the only one commiting to the repo. There was either no code and a lot of bullshit from the others or crap code that didn't even compile despite their assurances it was all good.. Someone clearly never actually coded and pressed "run" in their lives which is fucking surprising since they've managed to graduate with a BSc and get into a MSc somehow. None of the code "made" by the other 3 persons made it into the master branch for release.
The attitude was that of "We (hahahah) wrote loads of code. We'll get a great mark!". At that stage the core wasn't even complete and the software didn't work yet.
Some of the courses where teaching things already 10 years out of date and when lecturer where pressed on that the few mature students that happen to be there the answer was always "yes, we are planning to update it for next year". Complete bullshit. Didn't help that some of the code on the lecture slides was not even correct! I mean these guy are touted as "experts" in their field...
None of the teory during the entire year was linked to any coding. Everything was abstract with no ties to applied software engineering. I.e. nothing like the real world.
The worst is that none of the youger students realised they were being screwed over and getting very little value for their money. Perhaps one reason why these evaluation forms have such high scores given on them. If you haven't had a job and haven't lived outside academia yet there is nothing to compare it to. It tends to also fall into confirmation bias (hey it's a top UK university, it must be worth it afterall! Look how much they ask for).
By the end of the year I couldn't wait to get the hell out. One of the other mature student sumed it quite well: "I will never send my children here."
Keep in mind that the guy had just over a decade of software engineering experience in the industry and was doing this for fun.
In the end universities are not teaching institutions. The lecturers's primary job is research and their priorities match that. Lectures tend to be the most time efficient teaching format for the ones giving them but, on their own, are not for the consumer.
To those contemplating university for CS: Do the BSc. Get your algo/datastructure chops and learn the basic theory. It is interesting. Don't get discouraged by the subject just because it is taught badly.
Avoid the MSc unless you want to do a phd and go for an academic carrer. You are better off using that year and the money to learn more on your own and get into colaborative projects (open source) on top of some personal ones. Build up your portfolio. It will be cheaper and more interesting!2 -
Hey everyone!
I'm thinking of building an open-source React Native app for DevRant just as a fun project. I came across an unofficial API documentation and also a wrapper.
https://devrant-docs.github.io/
https://github.com/danillouz/...
If anyone has used these, kindly let me know your experience and which one is better.
PS: I have no intention to publish or earn money from this project. Anyone who is interested can jump into the project and help in making it better. If enough people want to use it, I can compile an apk/ipa for people to download later on.devrant react native devrant app open source community project community app github android devrant api ios -
I haven't written a line of code in over a month ever since I stopped working due to health issues...
And I have no desire or ideas to create any new apps...
Sorta feels like I'm throwing away 20+ years of work/experience/passion.
Maybe I should just solve algo problems for fun?
Or should I finally try doing some (Java) open source...
Where to find projects?7