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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 Tim48 -
Latest update for the devRant app has some new twists: 1) collabs are now free for all 2) black theme is available for devRant++ members 3) when posting a rant we now ask for you to classify the rant as a specific type of post. RIP !rant :/ To be clear, this isn't meant to say that any posted content needs to be different than what everyone is doing already, just that the extra categorization helps all parties who like or dislike different types of content. This categorization will help better inform the algo and allow for advanced filtering which is coming soon.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns please ask me or @dfox in this thread.65 -
A devRant Update!
Hey everyone,
We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.
Highlights since our last update:
- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.
- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!
- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!
Some stuff we have in the pipeline:
- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!
A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:
We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.
What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!
Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.
Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus38 -
I wanted to post a note on devRant community etiquette and rule-breaking behavior we’ve been seeing lately to make clear it will not be tolerated. This is pretty much a rehash of this rant, https://devrant.com/rants/609739/... and also our official rules which I highly encourage people to read: https://devrant.com/rules
I’ve noticed an influx of a select group of members, mostly older users, expressing a distain towards other users or declaring content they dislike “shouldn’t be posted”, “please stop”, etc. If you find yourself about to post that, as per our rules, please don’t. It blatantly violates our rules and we are going to start cracking down on it much more. Whether you have 30k+ points or 10, we will apply the rules fairly to everyone and not give breaks to specific people, which admittedly I’ve done in the past.
If we see this behavior in rants/comments first we will give a warning (and the rant/comment will be deleted) and the next offense is a ban.
A valid question (even though I’ve answered it before) might be why does this need to be a rule? Simply put, it’s a rule for a number of reasons: posts like described try to inflict one’s will upon the entire community (even though we have a Democrat voting process...), they create confusion (almost every time they try to sound official, ex. “Stop doing this”), and beyond those two main reasons, they literally accomplish nothing because they offer no constructive methods of achieving what’s being requested, and only a fraction of the community will actually see it.
Here’s an example of what’s not allowed and what is allowed:
- Allowed: posting an issue on our GitHub issue tracker saying “I really dislike seeing this type of rant in my algo feed, here’s some ideas I have to improve the algo and add more personalization so I can see what I want.”
- Allowed: posting on GitHub issue tracker: “I found this awesome image similarly algo that I think can improve the ‘repost check feature’ - you guys should check it out and see if it might be good”
- Not allowed: “Omg stop shitposting windows update rants and Linux rants I hate them. Go post this type of rant because that’s what everyone really wants to see.”
One is constructive an the other is merely an opinion expressed as an enforcement of a self-made rule on the community and tries to tell other people how they should use devRant.
I cringe when people tell others how to use devRant because without fail when I see those posts, I go through that person’s rant/comment history and I nearly always see them using devRant in some kind of way I disagree with or isn’t exactly what I like to see. But that’s OK. I understand I’m not going to enjoy everything posted and I’m also not going to agree with everything posted. But I think it’s fair for those same people to then lecture on what isn’t appropriate to post on devRant, and it’s even more silly when their posts are sometimes irrelevant to development and the posts they are complaining about are relevant.
In the end, based on the large majority of feedback we get, we want to make devRant a place where everyone feels comfortable expressing themselves and doesn’t have to think about possibly getting ridiculed every time they post and that don’t have people trying to dictate what kind of ideas they are allowed to post. We also realize there’s types of content people don’t enjoy, but telling others not to post it is not the solution. We will soon be launching post type filters that will make filtering rants by post type possible.
Please let me know if you have any questions and thanks for reading.64 -
Boss: make this thing
Me: yeah no worries. Where is the spec?
Boss: We don't have enough one but we outsourced the design so call him
Designer: haven't started yet
Me: excellent
Boss: I'm going on holiday. I'll leave this to you.
Me: erm ok. I'm having a few problems getting stuff out of the designer though.
*2 weeks later and still no designs*
Boss: I'm back. Where is the progress?!
Me: indeed.
*1 week later i get half designs that sort of make sense*
Boss: hurry up!
*1 week later*
Me: designer you're busting my balls here
Designer: yeah lol
Me to boss: still having problems. No idea what I'm doing.
Boss: deal with it
*2 days later*
PM: we are demoing it to clients tomorrow
Me: brilliant. I'll become a magician then.
* Meeting goes well and no one notices the thing is a bit buggy*
*2 days later*
Me to boss and pm: you already know whats going on but I'll keep trying.
Boss: ok it's just a proof of concept anyway.
Designer: yeah here's the rest of the designs lol
*1 week later, the designs made no sense, no idea what they wanted but hey it's a proof of concept so I'll just do my best...*
*suddenly again, hey you have 1 week before we sell it. Lol. smashes a product together as fast as humanly possible, due to half designs and no time to do it right even html classes and CSS aren't right - didn't know things would be repeated at the time. No time to fix entire thing. Luckily just a proof of concept*
New senior developer: hey boss just said this is being sold tomorrow.
Me: wtf..It's a proof of concept and i was given longer...
New senior developer: no
Me: :(
Senior developer and all colleagues: it's full of bugs and doesn't work
Me: yes that will happen without specs, random tight deadlines, no designs that made sense and a total of about a week and a half to make an entire system for multiple user types to make applications, send messages, post jobs, handle all paperwork and move paperwork among different user types as they go through applications. I told everyone what was going on but i get no support...
*Silence*
Boss: wtf i gave you so long! All i know is my entire staff is working on a product that should be done ages ago
Me: ok, however i have said almost every day i need-
Boss: I'm not interested
*I finish my placement year and never get any promised work or the job offer*
Seems legit?16 -
⚡️ devRantron v1.4.1 ⚡️
I strongly urge all the users of the devRantron to upgrade their app. We have added some major features and made a lot of bugfixes. For example:
1. Edit Rants and Comments
2. Browse Weekly
3. Save drafts of rants so that you can edit and post them later. Also, the app now autosaves when you are typing a new rant and will keep it until you post it.
4. Fixed macOS startup. Previously the app used to open a terminal in the background to launch the app. That has been removed.
5. Confirmation before deleting a rant or comment
6. Huge performance optimization. We have upgraded to React 16 and also changed the way our compiler compiles the application. The way we fetch the notifications has also been changed and it uses less bandwidth.
7. The app will only have single instance now. If you accidentally open the app again, it will just switch to the currently running instance.
8. We now show a release info dialogue before updating. Linux and macOS users will now receive an update notification for new updates.
9. Added the ability to select rant types.
You can get it from here: https://devrantron.firebaseapp.com/
macOS users, please remove the devRantron from "Login Items" in Settings > Users and Groups.
We would like to thank all our users for giving us the feedbacks. If you like the app, you can show your appreciation by giving a start to the repo.
Thank you!23 -
//
// devRant unofficial UWP update (v1.5.6)
//
Hi!
A new update for Windows 10 users is in certification right now (will be available in a few hours/days), with the new feature you could see a few days ago on the official client.
But the main reason of this post is that I've seen the success of the official Issue Tracker created in August by @dfox and @trogus on GitHub.
For this reason I decided to do the same for the unofficial client.
Feel free to post bugs reports (I prefer this method instead of emails) and requests of features (even if not available in the official client) you would like to see.
https://github.com/JakubSteplowski/...
Complete changelog of v1.5.6:
- Added new 'post type' selector for easier classification of rant types in the future;
- Added Official devRant unofficial Issue Tracker on GitHub;
- Added Feedback page with link to GitHub Issue Tracker repo;
- Added black theme... no, wait... already there.
- Minor UI improvements;
- Minor back-end improvements;
I hope to see a lot of interesting feature requests I will enjoy to implement to make the UWP client always the best for you, Windows community. 😁18 -
Some of you probably already know about this, but I figured i'd post it just in case.
Found a USB multiboot solution called Easy2Boot that supports over 300 different types of ISOs and payload files.
You could have 10 different linux live distros on the same USB or maybe a bunch of different windows installations on the same USB. The feature list is quite huge and it seems better than the other multiboot alternatives I found out there.
Happy booting9 -
Having to review an offshore C++ codebase made in Romania that the company I worked for they bought to control a wifi module on a complex RF mobile tech device that I can't legally give more details on.
If I could legally post this masterpiece, or should I say masterpiece-of-shit, all of you C++ dev would instantly get AIDS and all the existing types of cancer upon browsing it for 2 minutes.
It's laughably bad and unmaintainable. One of my colleague called it "the perfect example of human obfuscation" and it fits perfectly.
Think of a 100k LoC main function with nested loops and ifs with random sleep values, 1000 values of hardcoded 32 bits arrays declared globally in the first 10k lines for unknown reasons. Comments in Romanian mixed with english. Somehow, this shit works by some miracle.
The worst intern you can think of, while being piss drunk, could do better and it's no joke.5 -
!rant && Announcement
The closed beta for the new DEVRANT TOOLBOX is starting for chrome users.
The Toolbox is an UNOFFICIAL web extension for Chrome and Firefox.
Additional features:
- Compact mode: reduced image height in the feeds
- Extended page navigation controls for feeds
- Timestamps for rants
- Image preview on mouseover
- Autoreload for the recent feed (180 sec)
- Highlighting new rants after a reload (recent feed only, see screenshot)
- Highlighting own rants (inside feeds) and comments (inside rants)
- Hiding personal scores (still visible by mouseover) and share buttons inside rants
- Colored notifs (different colors for the notif types)
- Notifs with clickable usernames: a click will open the rant AND the username (in a different tab)
- 3 additional Themes: Black, Monochrome, Dark blue
(Next themes to come: solarized light and dark)
- Global history.back on rightclick (for faster navigation)
- Increased feed width (see screenshot)
- Plain background (just the feed on screen)
- Weekly rant
All features can be switched on/off.
The weekly rant is a temporary feature. It uses the devrant api.
I will remove it when that feature is added to the original devrant webfeed.
@dfox: If you dont like the use of the api or some of the features please contact me.
Chrome users can join this group to get the beta:
https://groups.google.com/forum/...
I NEED SOME FEEDBACK!!!
Therefore a feedback is my term of use.
Please post it as a comment (or in the google group).7 -
Part 3: today has become a blog post.
WARNING: this is loooooooooooong
Background is my boss and I were talking about hiring the right people, also generalists vs specialists.
Essentially John and I are the specialists. When something goes wrong it ends up escalating to either him or me. But this is not sustainable as I can't handle the stress and most likely he eventually won't either.
And this goes back to general hiring standards.
All the good people leave and the remaining ones are stuck with all the problems and eventually for one reason or another they leave as well... or the code keeps getting worse... until someone decides to scrap everything and build a new one... But now the only people left to lead teams are monkeys.
Now current problem is the only person that can replace me is John and the only person that can replace John, at least in handling issues, is me...
It's a certain type of person, people that have a growth mindset and can pick things up.
Google and strong tech companies are full of these types of people where if needed there's always someone that can step in and help. They have the background and the ability to quickly learn. This also lets them innovate and identify and solve new problems.
I think that's what the technical interviews are for, to find these types of people.
And you really can't train this. I'm not sure how effective our "new" training program on high quality development is but I'm guessing it's not. Excellence has to be in the culture and it's not something that can be built overnight or by randomly hiring people.
So in a sense, tech companies aren't really paying well, they're paying cost to what their hires are really worth, after they've verified it, and enough to keep them from leaving.3 -
Two big moments today:
1. Holy hell, how did I ever get on without a proper debugger? Was debugging some old code by eye (following along and keeping track mentally, of what the variables should be and what each step did). That didn't work because the code isn't intuitive. Tried the print() method, old reliable as it were. Kinda worked but didn't give me enough fine-grain control.
Bit the bullet and installed Wing IDE for python. And bam, it hit me. How did I ever live without step-through, and breakpoints before now?
2. Remember that non-sieve prime generator I wrote a while back? (well maybe some of you do). The one that generated quasi lucas carmichael (QLC) numbers? Well thats what I managed to debug. I figured out why it wasn't working. Last time I released it, I included two core methods, genprimes() and nextPrime(). The first generates a list of primes accurately, up to some n, and only needs a small handful of QLC numbers filtered out after the fact (because the set of primes generated and the set of QLC numbers overlap. Well I think they call it an embedding, as in QLC is included in the series generated by genprimes, but not the converse, but I digress).
nextPrime() was supposed to take any arbitrary n above zero, and accurately return the nearest prime number above the argument. But for some reason when it started, it would return 2,3,5,6...but genprimes() would work fine for some reason.
So genprimes loops over an index, i, and tests it for primality. It begins by entering the loop, and doing "result = gffi(i)".
This calls into something a function that runs four tests on the argument passed to it. I won't go into detail here about what those are because I don't even remember how I came up with them (I'll make a separate post when the code is fully fixed).
If the number fails any of these tests then gffi would just return the value of i that was passed to it, unaltered. Otherwise, if it did pass all of them, it would return i+1.
And once back in genPrimes() we would check if the variable 'result' was greater than the loop index. And if it was, then it was either prime (comparatively plentiful) or a QLC number (comparatively rare)--these two types and no others.
nextPrime() was only taking n, and didn't have this index to compare to, so the prior steps in genprimes were acting as a filter that nextPrime() didn't have, while internally gffi() was returning not only primes, and QLCs, but also plenty of composite numbers.
Now *why* that last step in genPrimes() was filtering out all the composites, idk.
But now that I understand whats going on I can fix it and hypothetically it should be possible to enter a positive n of any size, and without additional primality checks (such as is done with sieves, where you have to check off multiples of n), get the nearest prime numbers. Of course I'm not familiar enough with prime number generation to know if thats an achievement or worthwhile mentioning, so if anyone *is* familiar, and how something like that holds up compared to other linear generators (O(n)?), I'd be interested to hear about it.
I also am working on filtering out the intersection of the sets (QLC numbers), which I'm pretty sure I figured out how to incorporate into the prime generator itself.
I also think it may be possible to generator primes even faster, using the carmichael numbers or related set--or even derive a function that maps one set of upper-and-lower bounds around a semiprime, and map those same bounds to carmichael numbers that act as the upper and lower bound numbers on the factors of a semiprime.
Meanwhile I'm also looking into testing the prime generator on a larger set of numbers (to make sure it doesn't fail at large values of n) and so I'm looking for more computing power if anyone has it on hand, or is willing to test it at sufficiently large bit lengths (512, 1024, etc).
Lastly, the earlier work I posted (linked below), I realized could be applied with ECM to greatly reduce the smallest factor of a large number.
If ECM, being one of the best methods available, only handles 50-60 digit numbers, & your factors are 70+ digits, then being able to transform your semiprime product into another product tree thats non-semiprime, with factors that ARE in range of ECM, and which *does* contain either of the original factors, means products that *were not* formally factorable by ECM, *could* be now.
That wouldn't have been possible though withput enormous help from many others such as hitko who took the time to explain the solution was a form of modular exponentiation, Fast-Nop who contributed on other threads, Voxera who did as well, and support from Scor in particular, and many others.
Thank you all. And more to come.
Links mentioned (because DR wouldn't accept them as they were):
https://pastebin.com/MWechZj912 -
(long post is long)
This one is for the .net folks. After evaluating the technology top to bottom and even reimplementing several examples I commonly use for smoke testing new technology, I'm just going to call it:
Blazor is the next Silverlight.
It's just beyond the pale in terms of being architecturally flawed, and yet they're rushing it out as hard as possible to coincide with the .Net 5 rebranding silo extravaganza. We are officially entering round 3 of "sacrifice .Net on the altar of enterprise comfort." Get excited.
Since we've arrived here, I can only assume the Asp.net Ajax fiasco is far enough in the past that a new generation of devs doesn't recall its inherent catastrophic weaknesses. The architecture was this:
1. Create a component as a "WebUserControl"
2. Any time a bound DOM operation occurs from user interaction, send a payload back to the server
3. The server runs the code to process the event; it spits back more HTML
Some client-side js then dutifully updates the UI by unceremoniously stuffing the markup into an element's innerHTML property like so much sausage.
If you understand that, you've adequately understood how Blazor works. There's some optimization like signalR WebSockets for update streaming (the first and only time most blazor devs will ever use WebSockets, I even see developers claiming that they're "using SignalR, Idserver4, gRPC, etc." because the template seeds it for them. The hubris.), but that's the gist. The astute viewer will have noticed a few things here, including the disconnect between repaints, inability to blend update operations and transitions, and the potential for absolutely obliterative, connection-volatile, abusive transactional logic flying back and forth to the server. It's the bring out your dead approach to seeing how much of your IT budget is dedicated to paying for bandwidth and CPU time.
Blazor goes a step further in the server-side render scenario and sends every DOM event it binds to the server for processing. These include millisecond-scale events like scroll, which, at least according to GitHub issues, devs are quickly realizing requires debouncing, though they aren't quite sure how to accomplish that. Since this immediately becomes an issue with tickets saying things like, "scroll event crater server, Ugg need help! You said Blazorclub good. Ugg believe, Ugg wants reparations!" the team chooses a great answer to many problems for the wrong reasons:
gRPC
For those who aren't familiar, gRPC has a substantial amount of compression primarily courtesy of a rather excellent binary format developed by Google. Who needs the Quickie Mart, or indeed a sound markup delivery and view strategy when you can compress the shit out of the payload and ignore the problem. (Shhh, I hear you back there, no spoilers. What will happen when even that compression ceases to cut it, indeed). One might look at all this inductive-reasoning-as-development and ask themselves, "butwai?!" The reason is that the server-side story is just a way to buy time to flesh out the even more fundamentally broken browser-side story. To explain that, we need a little perspective.
The relationship between Microsoft and it's enterprise customers is your typical mutually abusive co-dependent relationship. Microsoft goes through phases of tacit disinterest, where it virtually ignores them. And rightly so, the enterprise customers tend to be weaksauce, mono-platform, mono-language types who come to work, collect a paycheck, and go home. They want to suckle on the teat of the vendor that enables them to get a plug and play experience for delivering their internal systems.
And that's fine. But it's also dull; it's the spouse that lets themselves go, it's the girlfriend in the distracted boyfriend meme. Those aren't the people who keep your platform relevant and competitive. For Microsoft, that crowd has always been the exploratory end of the developer community: alt.net, and more recently, the dotnet core community (StackOverflow 2020's most loved platform, for the haters). Alt.net seeded every competitive advantage the dotnet ecosystem has, and dotnet core capitalized on. Like DI? You're welcome. Are you enjoying MVC? Your gratitude is understood. Cool serializers, gRPC/protobuff, 1st class APIs, metadata-driven clients, code generation, micro ORMs, etc., etc., et al. Dear enterpriseur, you are fucking welcome.
Anyways, b2blazor. So, the front end (Blazor WebAssembly) story begins with the average enterprise FOMO. When enterprises get FOMO, they start to Karen/Kevin super hard, slinging around money, privilege, premiere support tickets, etc. until Microsoft, the distracted boyfriend, eventually turns back and says, "sorry babe, wut was that?" You know, shit like managers unironically looking at cloud reps and demanding to know if "you can handle our load!" Meanwhile, any actual engineer hides under the table facepalming and trying not to die from embarrassment.36 -
@dfox Would you make it possible to cluster push notifications that occur on the same post? When I receive a lot of notifs at once it clogs up my notification center.
Additionally would it be possible so that I can completely turn off seeing certain types of notifs even in the app not just for push notifications (from what I gather that is the only thing I have control over)2 -
I don't think the Internet became toxic because of anonymity like all those people claimed post-90s
I think it became toxic because normal people with their real life cultures found it and brought their real life cultural norms onto it
I've been thinking why are video games communities so much more holistic than other types of communities
the last few years this is becoming less and less the case, however
and now even games suck.
games now, instead of their old cultures, are becoming derivative plain cultures
everything has to be easy, meaningless, shallow
everybody has to follow the meta or people rage at you with their entitlements to your behaviour
it's exactly like real life!
mystery solved11 -
@dfox @trogus : Do we have a feature of auto complete @ mentions ? If not, there can be an elegant feature to provide drop down suggestions to mention / tag user in comments after we type @ in comments of any rant ( not all the users , but author of the rant and those who previously commented on that particular rant previously. For example, if I commented on a rant of dfox, and trogus also comments and types @, me and dfox will be in the drop down, tapping on which will select and tag that user on that comment ). I bet users will love this devRant update. Sorry for long post , I don't have any potato :p5
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If you've ever tried using Go plugins raise your hand.
If you've ever tried doing plugins in Go, raise your hand.
If you think that the following rant will be interesting, raise your hand.
If you raised your hand, press [Read More]:
This is a tale of pain and sorrow, the sorrow of discovering that what could be a wonderful feature is woefully incomplete, and won't be for a very long time...
Go plugins are a cool feature: dynamically load pre-compiled code, and interact with it in a useful and relatively performant way (e.g. for dynamically extending the capabilities of your program). So far it sounds great, I know right?
Now let me list off some issues (in order of me remembering them):
1. You can't unload them (due to some bs about dlopen), so you need to restart the application...
2. They bundle the stdlib like a regular Go binary, despite the fact that they're meant to be dynamic!
3. #2 wouldn't be so bad if they didn't also require identical versions of all dependencies in both binaries (meaning you'd need to vendor the dependencies, and also hope you are using the right Go version).
4. You need to use -trimpath or everything dies...
All in all, they are broken and no one is rushing to fix it (literally, the Go team said they aren't really supporting it currently...).
So what other options are there for making plugins in Go?
There's the Hashicorp method of using RPC, where you have two separate applications one the plugin, one the plugin server, and they communicate over RPC. I don't like it. Why? Because it feels like a hack, it's not really efficient and it carries a fear of a limitation that I don't like...
Then we come to a somewhat more clever approach: using Lua (or any other scripting language), it's well known, it's what everyone uses (at least in games...). But, it simply is too hard to use, all the Go Lua VMs I could find were simply too hard to set up...
Now we come to the most creative option I've seen yet: WASM. Now you ask "WASM!? But that's a web thing, how are you gonna make that work?" Indeed, my son, it is a web thing, but that doesn't mean I can't use it! Someone made a WASM VM for Go, and the pros are that you can use any WASM supporting language (i.e. any/all of them). Problem inefficient, PITA to use, and also suffers from the same issues that were preventing me from using Lua.
Enter Yaegi, a Go interpreter created by the same guys who made (and named) Traefik. Yes, you heard me right, an INTERPRETER (i.e. like python) so while it's not super performant (and possibly suffering from large inefficiency issues), it's very easy to set up, and it means that my plugins can still be written in Go (yay)! However, don't think this method doesn't have its own issues, there's still the problem of effectively abstracting different types of plugins without requiring too much boilerplate (a hard problem that I'm actively working on, commits coming soon). However, this still feels to be the best option.
As you can see, doing plugins in Go is a very hard problem. In the coming weeks (hopefully), I'm going to (attempt to at least) benchmark all the different options, as well as publish a library that should help make using Yaegi based plugins easier. All of this stuff will go (see what I did there 😉) in a nice blog post that better explains the issues and solutions. But until then I have some coding to do...
Have a good night(/day)!13 -
How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.
But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.
And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.
I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!
But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.5 -
It's hard for me sometimes to tell the difference between a dev who actually got fucked and a dev who just didn't know how to budget their time correctly...
I've had freelance web friends who will go out partying twice a week... I've also had freelance web friends who shutter themselves indoors the moment a project of significance comes up. Both types have complained to me about crunch time.
Obviously i can't tell a whole story from just a devRant thread, but for a select few of them i really feel like this person just had no idea what they were doing, were negligent, or estimated their time way under the cut.
I'm not calling anyone out, I'm just saying that when you post about crunch when the item is something fairly obvious you should've been able to catch within the first week of the project, it makes me doubt your sensibilities.
Obviously I'm not making any judgements or saying that i know even half of what you know about the project and the job, but I'm just saying a little more detail couldnt hurt...7 -
This Rant is for all those toddlers like me who are exploring new places and platforms
I've worked on various platforms and interacted with various people everywhere. But believe me I've always categorised people in two : one who help and other who don't.
The one who don't help are indeed are of two types: one who know everything and want to pull you down
and
The other who know everything but guide you.
Most of us face the one who want to pull you down.
I'll suggest you to not get influenced by them.
They are everywhere, they might comment on my last post, they might -- my rant but still I love those who guide me.7 -
So I got a new project idea , an app that takes your image and fits it in a mac window like a border .
Basically when I make a new website or app and I want to post screenshots of it , just the plain screenshot of the app looks bland but if I have a nice aesthetic ✨ mac OS window around it with rounder corners and stuff , it would look very cool . I bet everybody here has seen something like this once or twice. Is there an app that does this already ? takes an image from the user and puts a window around it , with the minimize ,maximize and close buttons and let's the user download the final image . Not necessarily a mac window with there could be option for different types of windows . Even VS code repo on Github has a mac window around it lol . So I would like to make an app that makes this whole process easier instead of requiring you to edit images of your app (in case u don't have windows or a mac for screenshot)
What tools (tech stack )would I require to make a web app for this purpose ?5 -
as a seasoned systems eng myself, i had huge mental block of "i am not a programmer" whining when starting to incorperate agile/infrastructure as code for more seasoned syseng staff.
leadership made devops a role and not a practice so lots of growing pains. was finally able to win them over by asking them to look at how many 'scripts' and 'tools' they wrote to make life easier... and how much simpler and sustainable using puppet/ansible/chef/salt... and checking in all our sacred bin files and only approved 'scripts' would be pushed thru automation tool after post review.
we still are not programmers or developers, but using specific practices and source control took some time but saving us loads of time and gives us ability to actually do engineering
but just have 2 groups of younger guys that grew up wanting to be the bofh/crumudgen get off my systems types that are like not even 30... frustrating as they are the ones that should be more familiar with the shift from strictly ops to some overlap. and the devs that ask for root now that they can launch instances on aws or can launch docker containers and microservice..... ugggg. these 2 groups have never had to rack and stack servers, network gear, storage... just all magic to them because they can start 50 servers with a button click.
try to get past the iam roles, acls, facls, selinux and noshell i have been pushing. bitches. -
Aka... How NOT to design a build system.
I must say that the winning award in that category goes without any question to SBT.
SBT is like trying to use a claymore mine to put some nails in a wall. It most likely will work somehow, but the collateral damage is extensive.
If you ask what build tool would possibly do this... It was probably SBT. Rant applies in general, but my arch nemesis is definitely SBT.
Let's start with the simplest thing: The data format you use to store.
Well. Data format. So use sth that can represent data or settings. Do *not* use a programming language, as this can neither be parsed / modified without an foreign interface or using the programming language itself...
Which is painful as fuck for automatisation, scripting and thus CI/CD.
Most important regarding the data format - keep it simple and stupid, yet precise and clean. Do not try to e.g. implement complex types - pain without gain. Plain old objects / structs, arrays, primitive types, simple as that.
No (severely) nested types, no lazy evaluation, just keep it as simple as possible. Build tools are complex enough, no need to feed the nightmare.
Data formats *must* have btw a proper encoding, looking at you Mr. XML. It should be standardized, so no crazy mfucking shit eating dev gets the idea to use whatever encoding they like.
Workflows. You know, things like
- update dependency
- compile stuff
- test run
- ...
Keep. Them. Simple.
Especially regarding settings and multiprojects.
http://lihaoyi.com/post/...
If you want to know how to absolutely never ever do it.
Again - keep. it. simple.
Make stuff configurable, allow the CLI tool used for building to pass this configuration in / allow setting of env variables. As simple as that.
Allow project settings - e.g. like repositories - to be set globally vs project wide.
Not simple are those tools who have...
- more knobs than documentation
- more layers than a wedding cake
- inheritance / merging of settings :(
- CLI and ENV have different names.
- CLI and ENV use different quoting
...
Which brings me to the CLI.
If your build tool has no CLI, it sucks. It just sucks. No discussion. It sucks, hmkay?
If your build tool has a CLI, but...
- it uses undocumented exit codes
- requires absurd or non-quoting (e.g. cannot parse quoted string)
- has unconfigurable logging
- output doesn't allow parsing
- CLI cannot be used for automatisation
It sucks, too... Again, no discussion.
Last point: Plugins and versioning.
I love plugins. And versioning.
Plugins can be a good choice to extend stuff, to scratch some specific itches.
Plugins are NOT an excuse to say: hey, we don't integrate any features or offer plugins by ourselves, go implement your own plugins for that.
That's just absurd.
(precondition: feature makes sense, like e.g. listing dependencies, checking for updates, etc - stuff that most likely anyone wants)
Versioning. Well. Here goes number one award to Node with it's broken concept of just installing multiple versions for the fuck of it.
Another award goes to tools without a locking file.
Another award goes to tools who do not support version ranges.
Yet another award goes to tools who do not support private repositories / mirrors via global configuration - makes fun bombing public mirrors to check for new versions available and getting rate limited to death.
In case someone has read so far and wonders why this rant came to be...
I've implemented a sort of on premise bot for updating dependencies for multiple build tools.
Won't be open sourced, as it is company property - but let me tell ya... Pain and pain are two different things. That was beyond pain.
That was getting your skin peeled off while being set on fire pain.
-.-5 -
Following from https://devrant.com/rants/1516205/...
My emacs journey day 0-1
0: quickly realised what I was getting myself into, wow that is a learning curve. Head is buzzing with different key commands (and thank you to everyone who's helped out in my original post). I've been here before with Vim, but it's so hard when I am proficient with another editor, one of the most difficult aspects is getting it set up to even format my code appropriately (the right tab width etc), but I press on, something tells me it will be worth it in the end.
1: I come across a tutorial for clojure and emacs (https://braveclojure.com/basic-emac...), this looks good, oh sweet it shows how to load a good configuration, some more useful commands, feels like I'm getting there. Then it hits me, I manage to put my finger on why I decided to take the plunge: emacs isn't an editor at heart, at its heart is lisp. From its core it is scripted using one of the most powerful types of languages. Rather than some bolted on domain specific scripting language.
Now the real learning begins.2 -
Looking for some advice from anyone who has used and transitioned away from Material-ui (React).
https://material-ui.com/
Tasked with removing the Material-ui used in our react project. Old team took shortcuts like using these types of frameworks at every step and the software is brittle.
Any advice from anyone who has ripped Material-ui out of a project.
We are doing this to move away from CSS-in-JS and this is conflicting with every fucking element in the fucking project.
<TextField> with it's special internal props
<Buttons> with its fucking "classes" prop that one take fucking CSS-in-JS
Any advice or just say some random shit or post a GIF for the lulz.
Peace.2 -
I don't understand when applying for job .. companies just post their product .. ask for improvements, bugs etc, :( Do I need to look over that I just skipped that types of jobs . Is this worth it to study their product and then apply ?3
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TypeScript is bullshit. Change My Mind:
I am a student and I started learning typescript as an advanced project at the recommendation of my teachers because I am a bit ahead of where my software development course is.
I started by testing the logic of types, and then I encountered type: unknown.
According to the TS handbook:
"If you have a variable with an unknown type, you can narrow it to something more specific by doing typeof checks, comparison checks, or more advanced type guards that will be discussed in a later chapter:"
So according to what this says, if you check a variable of type unknown, to equal a certain object type, typescript will allow you to assign that unknown value a I tested this out with a data type - objects and typescript freaks out.
Also, if create object with a property assigned to a function, it won't even show you that property when you console.log the object
ALSO, you can't post urls in this website, so this website is also pretty trash.12 -
#Suphle Rant 6: Deptrac, phparkitect
This entry isn't necessarily a rant but a tale of victory. I'm no more as sad as I used to be. I don't work as hard as I used to, so lesser challenges to frustrate my life. On top of that, I'm not bitter about the pace of progress. I'm at a state of contentment regarding Suphle's release
An opportunity to gain publicity presented itself last month when cfp for a php event was announced last month. I submitted and reviewed a post introducing suphle to the community. In the post, I assured readers that I won't be changing anything soon ie the apis are cast in stone. Then php 7.4 officially "went out of circulation". It hit me that even though the code supports php 8 on paper, it's kind of a red herring that decorators don't use php 8 attributes. So I doubled down, suspending documentation.
The container won't support union and intersection types cuz I dislike the ambiguity. Enums can't be hydrated. So I refactored implementation and usages of decorators from interfaces to native attributes. Tried automating typing for all class properties but psalm is using docblocks instead of native typing. So I disabled it and am doing it by hand whenever something takes me to an unfixed class (difficulty: 1). But the good news is, we are php 8 compliant as anybody can ask for!
I decided to ride that wave and implement other things that have been bothering me:
1) 2 commands for automating project setup for collaborators and user facing developers (CHECK)
2) transferring some operations from runtime to compile/build TIME (CHECK)
3) re-attempt implementing container scopes
I tried automating Deptrac usage ie adding the newly created module to the list of regulated architectural layers but their config is in yaml, so I moved to phparkitect which uses php to set the rules. I still can't find a library for programmatically updating php filed/classes but this is more dynamic for me than yaml. I set out to implement their library, turns out the entire logic is dumped into the command class, so I can neither control it without the cli or automate tests to it. I take the command apart, connect it to suphle and run. Guess what, it detects class parents as violations to the rule. Wtflyingfuck?!
As if that's not bad enough, roadrunner (that old biatch!) server setup doesn't fail if an initialization script fails. If initialization script is moved to the application code itself, server setup crumbles and takes the your initialization stuff down with it. I ping the maintainer, rustacian (god bless his soul), who informs me point blank that what I'm trying to do is not possible. Fuck it. I have to write a wrapper command for sequentially starting the server (or not starting if initialization operations don't all succeed).
Legitimate case to reinvent the wheel. I restored my deleted decorators that did dependency sanitation for me at runtime. The remaining piece of the puzzle was a recursive film iterator to feed the decorators. I checked my file system reader for clues on how to implement one and boom! The one I'd written for two other features was compatible. All I had to do was refactor decorators into dependency rules, give them fancy interfaces for customising and filtering what classes each rule should actually evaluate. In a night's work (if you're discrediting how long writing the original sanitization decorators and directory iterator), I coupled the Deptrac/phparkitect library of my dreams. This is one of the those few times I feel like a supreme deity
Hope I can eat better and get some sleep. This meme is me after getting bounced by those three library rejections