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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
48 -
devRant just hit 50,000 downloads on Android (fancy new store badge, yay!). Thank you everyone for being part of this community and spreading the good word! @dfox and I have some fun new features in the works, exciting times!
23 -
I'm the biggest dumbass, the laziest procrastinator I know of..
Joined devRant in June 2017, got eligible for the stickers in a week's time, sent a mail requesting them, but never received it. Given the size of our community, I thought I'm way behind in the list and probably receive them in few months. After a year, I totally forgot about it.
But, the colossal stupid that I am, had also lost the key to my mailbox (the physical one). I never cared about the lost key, because who sends post these days !!!
When I finally got a duplicate key for my mailbox after 2 years, guess what I found.. a first class international mail from devRant which arrived on July 2017 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️, couple of weeks after I originally requested
But, yay... I finally got them..
16 -
You is not gonna beliebers what just happened lol
So a couple weeks ago I earned a stress ball (300+ ++'s) I sent an email about it but never got a reply, so I decided to just forget about it. But then I just ranted (lastnight) about how its so hard to get a stressball. So I basically just said "fuck it i'll buy one". Then some dude comes along and is like "omg not until he shows us the bought one" so I'm like CHALLENGE ACCEPTED and buy one...
Then I get an email confirmation from devrant store confirming my order for the bought stressball. And I notive that my spam folder has unread messages in it. i look inside the spam folder and what do I see?...
I see dfox replying to my free stressball request weeks ago lol. So yay, now I gets the 3 balls (or two - depending) lol omg, so many balls.
15 -
Gets an email from office facilities.
Email - A package has been received under your name, please collect it at the mail room in the 5th floor.
Me (excited as hell) - Yay! My devRant stickers are finally here!!!!
Gets to the mail room as fast as she could only to find that the stupid package was a stupid promotional offer from a stupid bank sending me a stupid credit card that I never even asked for. That entire day was a disappointment :-(
When am I getting my stickers! It's been ages!7 -
Feature request for @dfox:
Swiping for rants:
Left = nay, right = yay
Or better:
Match making via rants for devSingles.
Just kidding! I love devRant the way it is. It's the best app. Probably the best of all. It's huge. You'll like it.7 -
Can't tell what my most successful project is...
But according to GitHub Stars, my
most successful project is my RandomQuote Bot (@RandomQuote).
The story behind it is pretty boring:
One day little Skayo thought: "Hey there is no bot on DevRant yet, let's make one!".
Then he began to think: "But what should it do? What would be easy to do for an inexperienced programmer like me?".
Suddenly he got an idea: A Bot that posts a random quote everyday!
Yay!
He instantly started making it.
About a day later, it was finished.
"Let's bring this thing to live", he thought.
And there he was, quickly getting a lot of fucking ++'s...
This bot is like my first born child! I am so proud of him!
And that's the story behind the bot.
Very spectacular, isn't it?4 -
Areally appreciate this "blackest black" theme. It's definitely gonna help devRant not drain my battery so much as I'm surfing on my Galaxy S8 Plus with it's AMOLED display.
Yay for saving battery!
12 -
What if devRant made this app just to see how to improve their own company without looking like shit?1
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I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.
Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.
I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.
This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.
One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.
Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation
There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.
Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.
6 -
back to devrant, yay!
closed my account when i entered a really nice company, but after a year it was taken over by another one that was not-so-good at all, started working for another startup and, BOY, i really didn't miss ranting about work, but now i NEED a place to let this all up, little by little, somewhere, before my brain melts
current startup is one of those founded by rich dudes who had an "amazing" idea that, as time passed, turned into a monster that not only eroded the team from inside, but also made us see how spoiled the bosses are11 -
First day on my first job ever, the boss asks me what I want to do. I indicated that I had some experience with php and the yii framework (which was at some point very cool xD), so I wanted to start with something like that. And so it goes: after two days of watching laracasts (which is an awesome platform by the way! :O) I got assigned to a project.
Now the company I work at uses some kind of self built system that tracks how many hours are spent on which project, and compares that to how many hours was estimated implementing a feature would take. That's cool, but then I saw that for the project I was working on the time estimated was 5 work days. This was the estimate for both designing the interfaces and implementing both front and backend. I knew in advance that this was probably way to little time for me, but didn't want to come over as the new kid who can't do shit x)
Anyway, I started on the project and was having fun, but the biggest time consuming aspect of the project was not necessarily that I didn't have enough experience: it was that the developer who started this project and made most of the design choices had written some very messy code, without tests or apparently any refactoring. Also, everything was extremly inconsistent and not according to all the best practices I just watched in my laracasts spree.
So fastforward a little: we're way over the estimated hours. Yay. Now suddenly the boss comes by with an almost angry face that the client is becoming angry and we need to finish soon. He makes it entirely our (me and the front end guy) problem and I just decide to say nothing and try to work faster.
Now I'm stuck writing fugly code on top of more fugly code and when I mentioned to my front end guy that I was almost finished with feature but I only needed to finish up the tests, he said something like "oh just don't write tests, that'll take too long"... Is that really the mindset of this company?! No wonder the project I work on was in a very bad state.
Thanks to devrant I see now that I just need to say something if I know that I won't be able to complete something in a certain amount of time and that other people are just like me (thank god). :) I think I'll need to post more rants to vent my frustrations x)5 -
Agh, holy shit. devRant, I need some love.
I have successfully double-buffered the Windows console (cmd.exe) but all hell breaks loose when you resize the fucking window. The currently active buffer will receive the change in dimensions while the inactive buffer will not, resulting in the window quickly oscillating between the two sizes as the buffers change size.
That got me stuck for about a day. Today, I got it sort of working but it wasn't satisfying at all. I can get it to resize LARGER, but if you resize the window SMALLER, the actual buffer inside the window doesn't change size, so scrollbars appear and I have NO IDEA HOW TO FIX THAT. I somehow need to calculate, or use the API to find, the perfect dimensions (In rows and columns) for the console buffer INSIDE the window buffer for them to not have scrollbars.
And I just - -
I cannot gather the energy to do so right now.
I spent hours finding the solution to this bullshit and ONLY SOLVED HALF MY PROBLEM.
And stack overflow isn't exactly helpful. My problem is so specific that nobody even writes comments on the question.
I guess I need to calculate the amount of characters the screen can hold given the font size and the window size, but fuck, that's a lot of work to do just for something that probably won't even work anyways.
Well, off to the code editor again. Time to inevitably waste my time doing something that won't work.
Yay, programming.27 -
Why am I such an average ?
It's just a sad realisation. Nobody cares but I wanna send this out there, just to write thoughts.. I am 18 in 3rd year of high school (grammar school so nothing IT related, basically waste of time) and in IT I'm all self taught but I feel like I could be better if I just didn't [something]..
I feel like I wanna learn so many things but when I look at you, it seems like a common problem in the IT sphere so hey, average guy joining the club.
I also feel dumb when programming. I didn't manage to learn C++ in it's entirety because to really accomplish something, you've got so many ways to do it and finding the best one requires deep understanding of the tools you've got at your disposal with the language and I feel like I'm not capable of this(self learn, in school/Uni that's different story).. But many (most) of you are. I've tried many coding challenges and when I got it working, I just saw how someone did it in one line just by layering functions that I've never heard of..
Also, we've got kinda specific national competition here in many fields including IT for high schools.. And the winners always do sometimes like "AI driven Life simulation" or "Self flying drone made from ATMega from scratch with 3D simulation in C# to it" or "Game engine" or whatever shit and it's always from grammar schools and never IT related schools.. They are like me. Maybe someone helped them, I don't know, but they are just so far away from me while I'm here struggling to get the basic level of math for any kind of machine learning..
Yeah I've written Neural Network from scratch in C but meh, honestly it's pretty basic stuff .. I'd rather understand derivatives which we're going to learn next year and I'm too lazy to learn it from khan academy because I always learn something else.. Like processing (actually codetrain started teaching tensorflow so that might be the light for me...) Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh..
I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and doing nothing in the end. That was me like 6-12 months ago. Now I'm managing to pick 2-3 things and focus them and actually feel the progress.
But I lost track of the original point.. I didn't do anything special, every time I'm programming something, everyone does it better and I feel dumb. I will probably never do anything special, everyone around says "He's still learning he's genius" but they have no idea.
I mean, have you seen one of the newest videos on Google's YouTube channel (I openly hate them, but I will keep that away for now), something like "Sarah story" ? It's about girl that apparently didn't care about IT but self learned tensorflow on high school. I think it may be bullshit (like ALL of their videos ) but it's probably just fancied, not complete lie.
And again, here I am. I now C but I'm incapable of learning to program good which most of you did and are now doing for living. I'm incapable to do anything cool, just understanding what everybody else did and replicating it. I'm incapable of being clever.
Sorry, just misusing devrant to vent a bit17 -
After two days i just had to create an account. so glad a collegue of mine showed me devRant. Well, time to continue my beginner Python course.
yay4 -
Patience is the virtue!
Finally after ~3 weeks of waiting.... 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍
Thanks @dfox and @trogus ☺️☺️🤗🤗🤗
1 -
Yay devRant stickers!! I suppose I could rant about how they took almost 2 months to get here, but I have a policy against complaining about free things so I won't! And because, well... DevRant is awesome!
2 -
First day of vacation after 5 months of overtime... aaaaand I'm stuck in bed with a back issue.
Can't even code all the things I had in mind. Nice holidays incoming yay...
At least I have devrant.7 -
Yay ...hello all I'm new to Devrant. And I am loving it, community here is vibrant,funny and geeky :).I was at stack exchange, considering switching to devrant :)6
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annnd they arrived and being put to good use! I also have the other one on my laptop but my phone is broke so I can't upload.
3 -
And so I joined the club of receiving them fine looking stickers and shall proudly put them on me laptop! Thank you @dfox !
5 -
Hm, missed a bit this pile of sociopaths here on devRant.
Last few weeks:
I repeat myself, this shouldn't be hard.
Working on it for 5 mins.
O h m y g o d.
Quite nothing the past weeks worked like intended, people and management have been a complete desaster and the weather is killing me.
Cheers.
Oh. And my request to get an benzo perfursor and a sexy manly nurse was denied by my team colleague handling hardware management.
-.- He said me being in a good mood is the last missing sign that the apocalypse is happening.
Yeah. Shit is burning everywhere. We're e.g. getting hardware delivered by a supplier who said that the request *was* canceled (after 3 months...) Two days phoning back and forth, they don't understand how it was possible but we can keep the hardware. Yay. Except that we completely redid the whole planning a week before. Naaaayy....
And now I will do the best I can: get drunk.
Cheers. -
Got 'em stickers woohoo! All the way from Philippines. Letter got wet in the rain but the stickers are in good condition. Thanks devRant!
4 -
It's a tradition, I guess (and these travelled here from the other side of the globe so it's something special ;) )
@dfox
2 -
Hey there everyone, I stay in a hostel which tends to misplace all post, so I always have everything sent home.
And today is the day I finally received everything from the last six months that was couriered to me from home. I'm so excited. Finally got the devrant and WhatsMyIP stickers, the GCI and Twilio tshirts (The Twilio one is just too good) and also some cool handwritten notes. Loved it.
PS. Exams also ended today. So yay!
PPS. Now rooting for the stress ball 😂
4 -
advice && !rant
I'd love some advice from you iOS devs on devRant:
- Is it a solid career choice for a new grad? Does it limit your skillset early on?
- How open/active is the ecosystem and the open source scene?
- Storyboards? Yay or nay?
- What do you like the most about your job?
- What do you dislike the most about your job?
Thanks guys :)4 -
I'm not even in the mood to speculate how much time I've spent trying to convert this certain datatype from one of the frameworks we're using. I couldn't find it in the documentation, google and SO says to use a member which just doesn't work and seems to be deprecated.
I started writing my own converter which got way bigger than what I was comfortable with due to all the special cases needing separate checks and handling.
I eventually came across a function which does exactly what I needed. It was the one suggested by said googles and SOs, it was just... recently renamed.
Not sure how to describe this sense of "yay, I found the proper solution!" and "are you fucking kidding me". Thank goodness for devRant. -
Just typed a comment for like 5 minutes on website version of devRant.
The red of the button got marked on my eyes, so I have now an area of the eyes that sees blue tint.
Yay
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