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.

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 @trogus

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?

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 booting

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.

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.

(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.

@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)

you know what would be cool? a pie chart of the types of rants we post…

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 solved

@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 :p

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.

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)!

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...

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.

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 ?

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.

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 ?

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.

#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