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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 Tim
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Spaces Vs Tabs - A real world case.
So one of the menial tasks I was given here was to take a pretty mock and turn it into an HTML email template. Needless to say, I hate emails and HTML.
After many weeks of trial and error, rejection and tweaks, we're doing our final tests when someone noticed that Google's clients are chopping off the footer and saying "View Full Email".
A few searches yield that Google has a 102KB cut off for email size. We did some checks and found that we were at 104KB. I immediately thought it was my CSS inliner being a little too verbose, but as I went in to edit things, I noticed that the file was intended with spaces!
Now I'm a fan of Silicon Valley, and I recalled an episode from this past season where Richard mentioned something about saving file size by using tabs. I had never really considered that point.
So I went back into VSCode and told it to convert all of the individual templates that make up this giant email to indent with tabs...
The file size dropped from 104kb to 82kb.
I wasn't very polarized on the Tabs vs Spaces debate, but this here has given me a nice real world example as to why tabs rule.
20 -
We're using a ticket system at work that a local company wrote specifically for IT-support companies. It's missing so many (to us) essential features that they flat out ignored the feature requests for. I started dissecting their front-end code to find ways to get the site to do what we want and find a lot of ugly code.
Stuff like if(!confirm("blablabla") == false) and whole JavaScript libraries just to perform one task in one page that are loaded on every page you visit, complaining in the js console that they are loaded in the wrong order. It also uses a websocket on a completely arbitrary port making it impossible to work with it if you are on a restricted wifi. They flat out lie about their customers not wanting an offline app even though their communications platform on which they got asked this question once again got swarmed with big customers disagreeing as the mobile perofrmance and design of the mobile webpage is just atrocious.
So i dig farther and farthee adding all the features we want into a userscript with a beat little 'custom namespace' i make pretty good progress until i find a site that does asynchronous loading of its subpages all of a sudden. They never do that anywhere else. Injecting code into the overcomolicated jQuery mess that they call code is impossible to me, so i track changes via a mutationObserver (awesome stuff for userscripts, never heard of it before) and get that running too.
The userscript got such a volume of functions in such a short time that my boss even used it to demonstrate to them what we want and asked them why they couldn't do it in a reasonable timeframe.
All in all I'm pretty proud if the script, but i hate that software companies that write such a mess of code in different coding styles all over the place even get a foot into the door.
And that's just the code part: They very veeeery often just break stuff in updates that then require multiple hotfixes throughout the day after we complain about it. These errors even go so far to break functionality completely or just throw 500s in our face. It really gives you the impression that they are not testing that thing at all.
And the worst: They actively encourage their trainees to write as much code as possible to get paid more than their contract says, so of course they just break stuff all the time to write as much as possible.
Where did i get that information you ask? They state it on ther fucking career page!
We also have reverse proxy in front of that page that manages the HTTPS encryption and Let's Encrypt renewal. Guess what: They internally check if the certificate on the machine is valid and the system refuses to work if it isn't. How do you upload a certificate to the system you asked? You don't! You have to mail it to them for them to SSH into the system and install it manually. When will that be possible you ask? SOON™.
At least after a while i got them to just disable the 'feature'.
While we are at 'features' (sorry for the bad structure): They have this genius 'smart redirect' feature that is supposed to throw you right back where you were once you're done editing something. Brilliant idea, how do they do it? Using a callback libk like everyone else? Noooo. A serverside database entry that only gets correctly updated half of the time. So while multitasking in multiple tabs because the performance of that thing almost forces you to makes it a whole lot worse you are not protected from it if you don't. Example: you did work on ticket A and save that. You get redirected to ticket B you worked on this morning even though its fucking 5 o' clock in the evening. So of course you get confused over wherever you selected the right ticket to begin with. So you have to check that almost everytime.
Alright, rant over.
Let's see if i beed to make another one after their big 'all feature requests on hold, UI redesign, everything will be fixed and much better'-update.5 -
aslkfjasf. i've spent 12 hours today (and lots more over the past two days) trying to reproduce a bug that my [sort of] coworker insists is present. I haven't seen any proof of it anywhere, let alone steps to reproduce it.
I've poured through the code, following all of its tangled noodles of madness from start to fuck-this-shit. I've read and reread the pile of demon excrement so many times i can still read the code when i close my eyes. so. not. kidding.
anyway, the coworker person is getting mad because i haven't fixed the bug after days, and haven't even reproduced it yet. This feature is already taking way too fucking long so I totally don't blame him. but urghh it's like trying to unwind a string someone tied into a tight little ball of knots because they were bored.
but i just figured out why I haven't been able to reproduce it.
the stupid fucking unreliable dipshit ex-"i'm a rockstar and my code rocks"-CTO buffoon (aka API Guy, aka the `a=b if a!=b`loody pointless waste of mixed spaces and tabs) that wrote the original APIs ... 'kay, i need to stop for breath.
The dumbfuck wrote the APIs (which I based the new ones on mostly wholesale because wtf messy?), but he never implemented a very fucking important feature for a specific merchant type. It works for literally every type except the (soon-to-be) most common one. and it just so happens that i need that very specific feature to reproduce this bug.
Why is that one specific merchant type handled so differently? No fucking idea.
But exactly how they're handled differently is why I'm so fking pissed off. It's his error checking. (Some) of his functions return different object types (hash, database object, string, nullable bool, ...) depending on what happened. like, when creating a new gift, it (eventually...) either returns a new Gift object or a string error basically saying "ahhh everything's broken again!" -- which is never displayed, compared against, or recorded anywhere, ofc. Here, the API expects a Hash. That particular function call *always* returns a Hash, no matter what happens in the myriad, twisting, and interwoven branches the code could take. So the check is completely pointless.
EXCEPT. if an object associated with another object associated with the passed object (yep) has a type of 8. in which case, one of the methods in the chain returns a PrintQueue that gets passed back up the call stack. implicitly, and nested three levels in. ofc.
And if the API doesn't get its precious Hash, it exclaims that the merchant itself is broken, and tells the user to contact support. despite, you know, the PrintQueue showing that everything worked perfectly. In fact, that merchant's printer will be happily printing away in the background.
All because type checking is this guy's preferred method of detecting errors. (Raise? what's that? OOP? Nah, let's do diverging splintered-monolithic with some Ruby objects thrown in.)
just.
what the crap.
people should keep their mental diarrhea away from their keyboards.
Anyway. the summary of this long-winded, exhaustion-fueled tirade is that our second-most-loved feature doesn't work on our second-most-common merchant type.
and ofc that was the type of merchant i've been testing on. for days. while having both a [semi] coworker and my boss growing increasingly angry at me for my lack of progress.
It's also a huge feature, and the boss doesn't understand that. (can't or won't, idk)
So.
yep.
that's been my week.
...... WHAT A FUCKING BUFFOON!3 -
Not just another Windows rant:
*Disclaimer* : I'm a full time Linux user for dev work having switched from Windows a couple of years ago. Only open Windows for Photoshop (or games) or when I fuck up my Linux install (Arch user) because I get too adventurous (don't we all)
I have hated Windows 10 from day 1 for being a rebel. Automatic updates and generally so many bugs (specially the 100% disk usage on boot for idk how long) really sucked.
It's got ads now and it's generally much slower than probably a Windows 8 install..
The pathetic memory management and the overall slower interface really ticks me off. I'm trying to work and get access to web services and all I get is hangups.
Chrome is my go-to browser for everything and the experience is sub par. We all know it gobbles up RAM but even more on Windows.
My Linux install on the same computer flies with a heavy project open in Android Studio, 25+ tabs in Chrome and a 1080p video playing in the background.
Up until the creators update, UI bugs were a common sight. Things would just stop working if you clicked them multiple times.
But you know what I'm tired of more?
The ignorant pricks who bash it for being Windows. This OS isn't bad. Sure it's not Linux or MacOS but it stands strong.
You are just bashing it because it's not developer friendly and it's not. It never advertises itself like that.
It's a full fledged OS for everyone. It's not dev friendly but you can make it as much as possible but you're lazy.
People do use Windows to code. If you don't know that, you're ignorant. They also make a living by using Windows all day. How bout tha?
But it tries to make you feel comfortable with the recent bash integration and the plethora of tools that Microsoft builds.
IIS may not be Apache or Nginx but it gets the job done.
Azure uses Windows and it's one of best web services out there. It's freaking amazing with dead simple docs to get up and running with a web app in 10 minutes.
I saw many rants against VS but you know it's one of the best IDEs out there and it runs the best on Windows (for me, at least).
I'm pissed at you - you blind hater you.
Research and appreciate the things good qualities in something instead of trying to be the cool but ignorant dev who codes with Linux/Mac but doesn't know shit about the advantages they offer.22 -
This is the craziest shit... MY FUCKING SERVER JUST SET ON FIRE!!!
Like seriously its hot news (can't resist the puns), it's actually really bad news and I'm just in shock (it's not everyday you find out your running the hottest stack in the country :-P)... I thought it slow as fuck this morning but the office internet was also on the fritz so I carried on with my life until EVERYTHING went down (completely down - poof gone) and within 2 minutes I had a technician from the data centre telling me that something to do with fans had failed and they caught fire, melted and have become one with the hardware. WTF? The last time I went to the data centre it was so cold I pissed sitting down for 2 days because my dick vanished.
I'm just so fucking torn right now because initially I was absolutely fucking ecstatic - 1 week ago after a year of doomsday bitching about having a single point of failure and me not being a sysadmin only to have them look at me like I'm some kind of techie flat earther I finally got approval to spend around 5x more per month and migrate all our software to containerized micro services.
I'll admit this is a bit worse than I expected but thanks to last week at least I have recent off site images of the drives - because big surprise I have to set this monolithic beast back up (No small feat - its gonna be a long night) on a fresh VPS, I also have to do it on premises or the data will only finish uploading sometime next week.
Pro Tip: If your also pleading for more resources/better production environment only to be stone walled the second you mention there's a cost attached be like me - I gave them an ultimatum, either I deploy the software on a stack that's manageable or they man the fuck up and pay a sys admin (This idea got them really amped up until they checked how much decent sys admins cost).
Now I have very flexible pockets because even if I go rambo the max server costs would only be 15-20% of a sys admins paycheck even though that is 13 x more than our current costs.
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Love the feeling of closing all those open tabs when you finally fix that bug and finish that task.1
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I have got so much stuff to learn.
I have had little to no experience with Python and JavaScript and was planning to learn the lot during my holidays. Where I'm from, we have a huge ass festival this weekend. So holidays for a couple weeks, at least. Probably the biggest festival in our country. And for the last two months, I had my exams. So no learning back then either. I have so many tabs open to learn stuff but I don't seem to get the time.
So for the last 4-5 days, I've been cleaning the house, top to bottom because its the holidays, the only time I stay home and free. It sucks to do it alone. My parents are getting old and get all sorts of back pain and shit upon little physical effort. So I should get all the stuffs done.
Yesterday, I finally finished my chores at 10 in the evening. But by the time the chores were finished, I was finished too. *sigh* I guess I shall find some time soon.2 -
!rant
So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.
To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).
I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/
I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.
I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.
But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).
I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.
What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!
Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.
I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.
Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.
What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/
Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.
To Summarize a bit.
It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.
So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.
I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..5 -
I got a REALLY nice compliment from my dev team today. But first, the setup...
Tuesday night, I pushed some changes before I left that totally borked the build today when my team pulled changes (this is an off-shore team, so we more or less work opposite hours). Fortunately, my team dealt with it easy enough since (a) it was pretty obvious what happened, and (b) my commit message had enough information to help them know for sure, and they just reverted one file and were good to go for the day (they didn't fix the problem, left that for me to do, which is proper).
It was an absolutely stupid, careless mistake: I somehow copied the contents of a JS file into a JSP and pushed it. Just a simple case of too many tabs open at once and too many interruptions while I'm trying to code (which is typical most days, unfortunately, but this day it had an impact other than just slowing me down).
But, those are the reasons it happened, they aren't excuses. It was carelessness, plain and simple.
So, once I fixed it, I sent a note to the team explaining it. It basically said "Look, that was a dumb, careless mistake on my part, my bad, sorry for the inconvenience, it's fixed now."
I had a message waiting for me in my inbox this morning that said how I'm an inspiration because despite all my knowledge and experience, despite being a long-time lead, they (a) appreciate the fact that I'm human and still make mistakes, and (b) I stand up and take responsibility when it happens and then do what's necessary to reverse the mistake.
That made my day :)
To me, it's just the right way to be (I credit my parents 100%), never occurs to me to do otherwise, but the truth is not everyone can say the same. Some people are insecure and play the CYA game right away, every time. Some people act like they never make mistakes in the first place.
I don't care if you're an experienced dev or a junior, always take responsibility for your actions, especially your mistakes. Don't try and bullshit your way out of them. Sure, it's fine to explain why it happened if there were factors beyond your control, but at the end of the day, own up to them, apologize where necessary, and then put in the effort to make it right. Most people have no problem with people who make mistakes every so often - everyone does, whether everyone admits to it or not - but those who try and shirk responsibility don't last long in this or any endeavor (you know, putting aside the professional bullshitters who build their careers around it... that's not most people, thankfully).10 -
I used to fucking love VSCode it visually was great, it was simple, had an integrated terminal that wasn't shit, supported many languages well (while not forcing every extension down your throat), and was straightforward to configure. I also had problems with it, mainly I felt it was way too bloated for an editor.
That good impression I had is gone now. It seems like every time I'm actually using the editor I have to fight with it. Whether that's an update that fucked up my config, or a reinstall and now I have to **convince** my fucking editor to use tabs instead of spaces automatically and I have to specify because holy shit it will not just listen after I set every possible fucking indentation setting to disable spaces or enable/prefer tabs and they keep adding shit like this that I give no shits about that make me sift through the damn settings finding the settings that turn off whatever new visual effect or quirky little automation they've implemented. I can't tell you how much I actively don't want my braces to be matched up by a color that doesn't even have anything to do with my color scheme.
Ive tried switching but holy shit intellisense is such a great feature that helps me so much so I'm not always bouncing between docs and my editor. Which ATM I'm learning go and intellisense has more fucking information on the functions than the docs do. I've seen Neovim (which is what I'm probably switching to) has language servers that are similar to intellisense so I'm intrigued to try that.
I'm just tired of constantly having to avoid all this shit I don't give a fuck about. I just want to get in, do my thing.
I won't be surprised if I'm the only one on this train 🤣8 -
Honestly, people who complain about Chrome using too many resources, it's fucking time to upgrade your toasters or close some of the 100+ tabs you NEVER use2
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Hello everybody! =)
I'm currently looking for a Trello / planning program for Linux that doesn't require an email signup nor requires a monthly payment (I know I R super cheap), since I have way too many tabs open as is and I just need something to help me keep on track with my projects easily and preferably in a visual manner. I would really appreciate any help and/or tips you wonderful guys and gals might have.
(>^-^)> Here's a cookie and some coffee in advance. <(^-^<)21 -
!Rant
Any recommendations for a daily planner that runs on Win7?
Prefer to have something desktop based (with Sync if possible) as I always have too many browser tabs open so a web based one will get lost or closed and therefore not do its job.
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