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)

Does anyone use https://vpsserver.com ?
Looking at migrating from an expensive VPS host to something self managed and potentially dedicated for my personal sites.

these guys seem to stand out at the price point without going to something like digital ocean / aws.

Or does anyone have any recommendations before I drop a few quid into them?

Just saw this awesome video about SVG:

https://youtu.be/dv2TvTXQ4FQ

Now I want to ask for resource where to start with SVG because I am really new to them...

Any recommendations?

Please be gentle, first rant. :)

Can you please provide me with literature recommendations:
1. Books about software architeccture, design patterns and best practices in general.
2. "Relaxation" books related to developer's life experiences, something like "The Phoenix Project" (https://amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-...). I really enjoyed that. :)

I am aware that this is not best use of rants, but I would really like to hear this community recommendations. Thanks in advance. :)

My First ever VSCode extension is live.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

A symbols tree view provider that supports PHP/TS/JS only (for now). Any suggestions/recommendations are welcomed !!!

Boy, does it feel good to feel like a real developer again 😎

!rant

Ok so I'm about to start working on an OS but I am going to run through a few tutorials to get the base systems down then I'll incorporate a interpreter for BASIC and my custom scripting language.

Just curious if anyone can point me in the direction of a few well written tutorials that will explain the systems being used. (I want to use Assembly and C only btw, but am open to others)

I only have 1 decent tutorial but it's older and complete (https://github.com/cfenollosa/...)

As I will have a new job soon and it seems likely that it will be in network api design I wonder if you have good book recommendations on the topic.

I already have "clean code", "clean architecture" and "design patterns" in my pipeline, so I need something more specific on designing network (restful) service apis.
(This is a follow up to https://devrant.com/rants/1828903/...)