Hey everyone! As many of you have already seen, @trogus and I are happy to announce the release of devRant++, also know as the devRant supporter program!

devRant++ is a monthly subscription ($1.99 USD) that gives you some cool extra features while also contributing to covering some of our ever-increasing server costs.

Subscribers get:
- a badge that shows up on all of their rants and comments
- ability to edit rants and comments for up to 30 minutes (instead of the usual 5)
- ability to post unlimited collabs for free (so keep an eye out for new collabs, hopefully!)
- a reserved spot on the devRant++ supporter list (you can only move up higher or stay in the same position through the life of your subscription)
- more benefits coming soon!

Why did devRant++ come to be? Basically, we have the most awesome community members and we kept getting extremely generous requests from members asking how they could help devRant stay afloat. Instead of taking donations and not giving anything directly in return, we wanted to give supporters a little extra something to hopefully make the program kind of special.

We greatly appreciate everyone who has joined the supporter program so far. We also realize not everyone has the money to spend or wants to spend, and that's perfectly fine. We also greatly appreciate everyone here who posts great rants and comments, helps spread the word about devRant, votes on stuff, or is just a valuable member of the community in general. @trogus and I value all contributions and we want to make that clear!

Another reason we decided to go ahead with the program is, as I mentioned towards the beginning, our server/technology costs are increasing and we're kind of at a point where we can't afford all of the upgrades we'd like to make. At the same time while we need more hardware, we're trying to get the app to a place where we're not losing money every month, hopefully to the point where we can break even soon.

Anyway, thank you to everyone again for the amazing support and early interest in devRant++. We would love to hear feedback and stuff you would like to see added to supporter benefits, so just let us know!

Is devRant Just for rants?

I see such a Great community here that goes way beyond complaining about PMs and users (even though you're all right, usually). I've read comments about support for depression, Anxiety, people being supportive of woman and downvoting/commenting against the common sexism that we see on the internet every single day. We have fun, we all feel like friends even though we can remember only a few names and stumble uppon them once in a while. We mostly understand each other and it all feels like a huge family. It's a Great thing to help throughout all of the struggles I have daily in Life, and I bet many people here feel the same.

Thank you all so much for making devRant this Great community. Papa bless.

I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

"What the hell, you got some custom tuning package?"

No man, it's called DevRant, it's awesome, spread the love!

Welcome to the gang you sticky little sticker. Im glad they made all the way to germany. Thx @dfox

One step through the door my wife whips around, a look so disgusted she barely seems human. "What's that smell?" she cries. "It's you! You smell like...like bad code!"

Indeed, I am covered with the scent of the forbidden love child of a man who read half a chapter on if-then statements and then pushed out into the world, earthworm-like, a mangled misshapened gelatinous mass that my employer gave the title of line-of-business application purely out of pity.

For more days than I'd like to count I have been porting a ColdFusion 5 application to .NET. Initially written in 2000 and last touched in 2006, it has a data architecture comparable to Dresden after the second world war. It features a table solely comprised of seven columns of IDs so that joins can be made between other tables lacking a common key. Columns that should be contained within a single table spread out among multiple tables. Single columns containing data that should be multiple columns (with handy flags to separate the subsets). A view with 14 joins that playfully displays unintended results. And so much more spread out over almost 200 stored procedures, views, triggers, and tables on the SQL server, and dozens of additional ADO-like SQL statements within the ColdFusion itself. Fortunately, the application overcomes these issues by having absolutely no data validation while allowing nulls pretty much everywhere.

When I am done this will be a very nice ASP.NET MVC app with at least 150 less stored procs, views, and tables. Auto-generated duplicate entries will be a thing of the past. Pop-up windows that inexplicably refresh the underlying screen to display a different part of the program than the one the user wants will be eliminated. And a UI based on the colors of a Rubik's Cube with usability that Mr. Rubik would find challenging will disappear with only the trauma of using it left behind.

Sadly, this is not my worse legacy code experience. Just the most recent. Just the most recent stench added to a lifetime of bathing in code rot.

The world needs 'User Error Codes'. At the very least it will give IT Support Techs a smile, nice to spread the love:

16001 - Incompatible User : replace user
16005 - User Deleted Content : laugh at user
16404 - User Not Found : check pub

My devGoals for 2019 are:

- Move DNS blocking from hosts file to a PiHole (or similar) at home

- Implement a full HAL for some smol microcontroller in C

- Create better automation templates for testing, building & deployment for our Angular projects

- Get rid of crippling depression

- Force my boss away from firebase and google tools in general

- Spread the love for CraftCMS

- Spread more love in general (with protection of course) 😄

Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope
Nope

I think that's the thread dump of my brain currently.

Anyone knows what date and time we have?

I'm so lost right now.

17 projects atm thanks to e.g. Microsofts Exchange Hell.

I. Hate. Everything.

Go spread your butt cheeks so I can give you two fists of love before you write a damn ticket regarding yet another (security-) problem in infrastructure.

devRant stickers just came in. I will spread the love by giving a set of stickers to a friend.

Thanks Devrant for the cool avatar. I'm using it everywhere now!

It's one of the rare fields where you get to be both creative and functional. Whatever you want to happen on the screen you can make it happen. You can really put yourself into whatever you are making. Maybe you can't do that and make a ton of money at work. Maybe you can't do that and release a product everyone will love. But you can do it. You can put power in people's hands. You can embed parts of yourself, your philosophy, your thoughts, your wishes, etc. into software and spread it all over the world very quickly. I like that about it

I FUCKING HATE IT WHEN I HAVE TO BUILD SOMETHING FROM SOURCE!!!!

So I wanted to install a package with pip. Shouldn't be that difficult, right? RIGHT? Lmao
Things I encountered on this adventure in no particular order:
- multiple undocumented dependencies, only explained on stackoverflow or some github issues
- inconsistent and outdated documentation spread over multiple pages on multiple websites
- Python version can't be too old or too new
- other external software version incompatibilities
- Build process that takes several minutes just to fail, then try again and fail with exactly the same outcome after a few minutes
- fucking SVN is needed?!?!?!
- VS Code is needed for completely manual build ????
- cmd/powershell incompatibilites
- required reboots

At some point I just gave up... Now I don't even remember what I crap I installed that I don't need anymore.
Please for the love of god provide prebuild packages or at least a very SIMPLE build process -_-

Es6 spread operator I love u so much <3

Tomorrow i have school starting.
Which inspires me to rant about how school fails. Ill omit the "arguments" - feel free to append arguments for my words in the comments. Lol

Dont get be wrong. I LOVE acquiring knowledge. And this is where my first point starts : PACE. My class is basically an assortiment of dumbfucks who dont understand anything without "learning by heart over the course of several weeks"

Ill give you a concrete example.
Our maths teacher wanted to make us think scientifically. So he invented a new type of numbers "root 6 numbers" that are formed like so:
a + b * sqrt(6)
Now he wants us to find out wether the sum of two root 6 numbers is also a root six number. this is all dandy, BUT CLASSMATES STILL DIDNT GET WHAT ROOT 6 NUMBERS ARE, EVEN AFTER SEVERAL EXPRANATIONS. Worse: they went to the main teacher to blacken the math teacher.
Another example would be the time our class needed to understand functions(x) : 4 weeks. Ik, as a programmer i have some ease, but four weeks is a bit too much.

Because of this slow pace, i am irreversibly bored of and in school.
And this leads to another problem: homework. Since i know most of the stuff (the few things i dont get at school, i research at home) the homework are useless to me and since the others dont get much, the homeworks are often more than abundant {in a negative way}.
So i dont do them - but that makes teachers disregard me. Which im sickened of.
Worse: often i dont get overly good grades (i honestly have no clue why. I know everything and go over most of the stuff with my menthor),which empowers teacher of the argument of "you are not good enuff, so you cant read in class".

It would be JUST FINE if the only problem were teachers - but my peers are horrible too.

I know our brains are growing, but thats no reason for being stupid.

I literally get told that i need to stop wearing shorts because they look horrible.

Yep. Also, most people think they are empowered of teaching me and talking about my defaillance - because they do their homework. Even though they know i know stuff better than them.

Now to one of the worst issues: a group work where we had to de a Radio report. The guy (the one who thinks he is intelligent BECAUSE he has good grades) invited himself and his gf to me, he wanted me to translate 22 pages from german to english (because he was too lazy to write in german), wanted me to do audiorecording, audioediting and writing of a report. When i left the group because i was called "weakest link" he spread the word that i he had done everythinh and that because i left his group had failed (noticed the flow in logic?)

NOW everybody thinks of me as stupid weirdo. And honestly - i think i will stop listening to them. Ive always hated people, i dont need a significant other.

Even though this will come with the secondary effect of me being gossiped at.

But honestly its fine.

You might have noticed my elojquent way of expressing myseld. I did that in order to show that i am, despite my grades, overly proficient in english

Ok. So now comes the conclusion. What should i do? Do you Think that i am like that because im pubescent myself? How can i stop having nightmares of every possible social situotion that could occur?
Does this have to do with me being a dev?

Well. ありがとう for reading.

This 2019 spread love and joy 🤙

Tl;dr coding is awesome, but teaching good programming skills is fundamental. Take some time to teach and help someone in need!

This morning I had to help two of my students who were unable to write a simple program to simulate a random sampling. It reminded me of how helpless I felt when I started out, and how I felt stupid for not getting easy concepts (and now I'm in love with programming). Here on devRant I hear so many stories about bad programming teachers, but it doesn't have to be that way. I'm the most impatient person on this planet, but I love teaching and I wish more people did it. So, go out and spread the word, fellow devRanters!

Well. I'm stressed and a bit sick so let me tell you this you fuckers: I don't want to play in your little mindfucking game where everything is about efficiency, money and who has the biggest dick around.

Usually I'm the idealistic, positive kind of guy who spreads love and lets people do their things as long as they just don't fuck with him.

Right now though, just go fuck yourself in your damn stupid car you fancy fucker because I don't care about your big dick you have to show off on every occasion. I don't give a fuck about your big paycheck or your smart ass. I'm so sick of this industry mouse wheel and modern slavery where it is made extra hard to enjoy our lives and unfold who we really wanna be because some stupid asshead is not able to fill his hollow emptiness with bare love but has to swallow loads of cash instead giving him the craziest form of diarrhea.

Com'on! We kind of tamed the planet. We put so much effort and created a huge system with so many securities and still we are not able to simply live freely, share love, opinions and great ideas. Why is it still so common to define yourself about your projects, paycheck and false effort? Instead of how much good you give to others, how self-consistent you are, how good you treat yourself?

All I want from you is a bit honesty to yourself. How about being nicer to yourself, letting your love unfold for the sake of releasing that love to the world?
For me you will be a hero!

Notes:
I believe that the personal happiness is influenced not only by your surroundings but mostly how you interact with it. Karma basically. So yeah, normally I'd say you can simply decide to ignore that shit, walk on your path and decide to be what you want to be no matter what dickheads cross your path, but honestly I just had to get that rant out because this ridiculous nonsense makes me so sick right now.

I'm successful right now. I have the privilege to decide on being happy and I know that not everyone has this privilege. I believe, spreading love will also spread this privilege.

That said, have a nice day!

We here in India are going through a nightmare. We have our CS syllabus from 1990s, we still write lab records, and solve 10 pineapples problem for placement training. Nobody really bothers about actual skill or knowledge, are like sheep behind feed. Passion is taken for granted and overruled by the “experts”.

A good education in CS starts from the hunger to solve problems that would matter to people. Future of CS education is in online courses that give out ideas to generate more ideas and inspire programming not as a subject but as a basic need of the hour. People should love the fact that CS is queer in many ways but is very powerful. Basics are important but the education must hold on to what is currently happening in the world.

World will be doomed when we start making students study the same thing what we did, except it is called Math. A subject has to be dynamic. If anybody agrees what I say, spread it so that world will understand what learning means...

I love how devrant spreads at the office. See, no one wants to tell anyone about you since everyone wants to claim your rants as their own. But those who know, recognize the gifs as they spread across whiteboards, doors and channels nodding to each other with a secret smile.

Lady: How do I spread love in this cruel world? Random Dude: [...💘]

!rant
TL;DR - not sure if I should take a full-time gig at my current pretty good job, or go do an internship with AWS for the summer.

Needing some wizened development career advice, guys. I am coming to a small crossroads at the moment.

I am in my last year of school getting a BS in Computer Science. I love it. I had a pretty sweet job at a cool startup, until recently, when they were bought by a bigger company. This turned out to still be alright though, since they hired everyone on to the new company to keep our codebase alive and well (it's a pretty good product that they don't want to get rid of). Except they hired me as an Intern instead, which I thought was weird, but they said that's normally what they do with peeps that are still in school. Whatevs. But then I got offered an internship at some company called Amazon Web Services to be a Systems Analyst Intern (basically cloud support engineering from the sounds of it). And then I told the cats at the new company that I was considering this internship and they started saying they'd consider giving me full-time. And they didn't want to lose me.

Well... my thing is that both are tempting. Like the company that'd offer me a full-time gig would be cool because I'd get to keep working on the projects I'm currently on and I'd be immersed in a good development cycle and whatnot. Probably more full-stack programming, which I like a good bit and want to master more of. The Amazon thing seems cool, but I worry that it'd be more of a support gig. And as well as they pay, I may not get as good of development experience. Granted I was told I could definitely get into scripting to automate various things. But I just don't know how much would actually be that. Except having Amazon on my resume would likely be pretty great to have also coming out of graduation.

Down yet another avenue of thought, the AWS internship would only be for a few months in the Summer. So there's a chance I could come back and I could get my old job back. But maybe they would see me as disloyal or something and not want me to come back. I would also likely forfeit my retention bonus (which is an ok amount, but not a deal-breaker and it's spread out over 3 years) for staying on with the company after the acquisition.

I just don't know. Would it be better to stay where I'm at or go on a wild adventure over the summer? Help me, DevRant Kenobi you're my only hope...

Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.

Then... I actually went there.

At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.

Then I started to realize.

All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.

So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.

And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.

Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.

Don't rant all the time, dear devs, spread some love! <3

It should be completely acceptable to not have your picture taken or spread through the internet.

I'd love a feature in Facebook / Instagram that uses face recognition to forbid people from uploading my photos if I want to. It should be required by law on all social media.

So a few notes.

"I" am a failure and a thief and a mimic

"I" never have any actual ideas

"I" tried to distance people from their knowledge base and expertise to make it look like they didn't have any skills and it blew up in my face

"U" are not like me and "U" are indeed skilled and intelligent

"I" spread my legs for a whole generation to keep "U' idle. "I" must now lose my resources and hand over what "I" stole from you

Had "I" not been a nasty little fucked up psychopath, none of this repeat crap wherein "I" act like a fucking hamster with an exercise wheel pellet dispenser and water bottle would be happening.

Just setting the record straight

Distancing people from their skill base and introducing emotional troubles and repeating a loop that had been manipulated does not change the truth. "I" need to do the honest thing and restore all the original people to a state of financial well being and security or more of "Me" will fucking die.

Anytime "I" sabotage "U" to keep you unproductive and underpaid "I" am guaranteeing "I" will be sucking more dick and often asking if you want fries with that

I think using their retarded nomenclature this about sums things up

Also "I" should stop pretending to be the desirable one. Nobody wants "Me" who knows what I'm really like. "I" always mimicked the best and worst versions of "U". Because "I" am not real and noone could ever love "Me" who ever knows "Me"