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

A note on devRant community etiquette. I've seen some behavior lately that I want to just mention since it goes against the rules of our community. We've specifically built moderation tools into upvoting and downvoting, and that is how all content should be moderated.

Commenting on rants that you don't think should be posted only gives them more exposure and unfortunately at times people trying to moderate content via comments and rants have gotten abusive towards other members. On the contrary, I've yet to see any of the people these select few members accuse of "ruining the community" act hostile towards anyone.

So with that said, I wanted to make sure this policy is visible, because commenting on other people's rants, especially in a hostile way to stop them from posting, is bannable and we really don't want to see it. Like mentioned before, that's what downvoting is for and it's much more effective since it doesn't boost the content like adding a comment does.

We take content quality seriously and while we haven't been able to eliminate reposts completely, we've made a lot of progress. For directly reposted content, we added the repost detector (https://devrant.io/rants/425054/...) and are still working to improve that and appreciate any feedback/ideas for it.

Like any community on the internet, devRant will always have some reposts and it will always have some content you really don't like. That's what comes along with being an open platform with very little moderation. We get requests to moderate more heavily, but we don't like censoring recent rants and don't plan to do that.

Most of the times people who repost content or an image didn't realize it was already posted. Not everyone uses recent sort and almost always they have no ill intent.

Anyway, feel free to let me know if you have any questions and feedback is always welcome.

EDIT: devRant April Fools joke (2017)
-------------------------
@trogus and I have had an absolute blast working on devRant over the last year. However, we're strong believers in only working on a project if you're passionate about it, and over the last few months, we've sadly lost some of that passion so we've to announce, with heavy hearts, that we will both be moving on. We've decided to focus 100% of our energies on our next product, one which we are confident has billion dollar potential: Semicolon JS (http://semicolonjs.com).

We identified this sizable market opportunity as we were building out the new devRant website. Every JavaScript framework we tried left us wanting more. More efficiency. More elegance. More extensibility. That's what Semicolon JS is: more. More than a framework, it's a guiding philosophy. We believe that Semicolon JS will do for front end development what Material Design has done for user interface design. We're calling it Semicolon JS because even though you can still develop JavaScript without it, like a semicolon, we think it will soon become a standard and synonymous with quality JS development.

So comes the obvious question. What will happen to devRant? We wanted to make the announcement today because we will be officially shutting down the product in 30 days. So that gives everyone a full month to take in the last memories, look at those rants they really loved, and hopefully take some time to chat with @trogus and I about Semicolon JS and what we have planned.

With so many thanks and looking towards the future,
- @dfox and @trogus

/*
* First anniversary of devRant unofficial for Windows 10 (UWP)!
*
* Let's celebrate by giving me 500 ++'s 😁
*/

Exactly 1 year ago, on 18 May 2016, I released the first public version (v0.9.2.0 BETA) of my client for Windows 10 users.
I found this wonderful community a few days before, on 12 May 2016, thanks to an article on TNW.
The only flaw was the missing Windows 10 Mobile client for my Lumia 950, so I decided to create a simple one on my own that initially allowed you only to see the list of rants, without the ability interact with them.
A few days later, after spamming the app on twitter, I was reached by @dfox, a very kind person, who gave me all necessary tools and help to bring all official features to Windows 10 users.

A project that I created initially just for fun and necessity became the main project I'm working at in a very short time.

I received a lot of positive reviews from users that motivated me to improve and continue it.
It's true, Windows 10/Windows 10 Mobile users are few, but they appreciate your work as no other and with a lot of feedbacks and suggestions help you to improve it making it very satisfying.

I would like to thank @dfox who made this possible, my friend @thmnmlst who helped me a lot with precious advices and created the presentation below, and of course the whole Windows 10 community! 😉

Good Ranting!

P.S.
If you haven't tried it yet: https://microsoft.com/store/apps/...
For all updates follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/JakubSOfficial

The v2 is coming... sorry for the delay, below a little preview (alpha) to be forgiven. 😋

I wanted to post a note on devRant community etiquette and rule-breaking behavior we’ve been seeing lately to make clear it will not be tolerated. This is pretty much a rehash of this rant, https://devrant.com/rants/609739/... and also our official rules which I highly encourage people to read: https://devrant.com/rules

I’ve noticed an influx of a select group of members, mostly older users, expressing a distain towards other users or declaring content they dislike “shouldn’t be posted”, “please stop”, etc. If you find yourself about to post that, as per our rules, please don’t. It blatantly violates our rules and we are going to start cracking down on it much more. Whether you have 30k+ points or 10, we will apply the rules fairly to everyone and not give breaks to specific people, which admittedly I’ve done in the past.

If we see this behavior in rants/comments first we will give a warning (and the rant/comment will be deleted) and the next offense is a ban.

A valid question (even though I’ve answered it before) might be why does this need to be a rule? Simply put, it’s a rule for a number of reasons: posts like described try to inflict one’s will upon the entire community (even though we have a Democrat voting process...), they create confusion (almost every time they try to sound official, ex. “Stop doing this”), and beyond those two main reasons, they literally accomplish nothing because they offer no constructive methods of achieving what’s being requested, and only a fraction of the community will actually see it.

Here’s an example of what’s not allowed and what is allowed:

- Allowed: posting an issue on our GitHub issue tracker saying “I really dislike seeing this type of rant in my algo feed, here’s some ideas I have to improve the algo and add more personalization so I can see what I want.”

- Allowed: posting on GitHub issue tracker: “I found this awesome image similarly algo that I think can improve the ‘repost check feature’ - you guys should check it out and see if it might be good”

- Not allowed: “Omg stop shitposting windows update rants and Linux rants I hate them. Go post this type of rant because that’s what everyone really wants to see.”

One is constructive an the other is merely an opinion expressed as an enforcement of a self-made rule on the community and tries to tell other people how they should use devRant.

I cringe when people tell others how to use devRant because without fail when I see those posts, I go through that person’s rant/comment history and I nearly always see them using devRant in some kind of way I disagree with or isn’t exactly what I like to see. But that’s OK. I understand I’m not going to enjoy everything posted and I’m also not going to agree with everything posted. But I think it’s fair for those same people to then lecture on what isn’t appropriate to post on devRant, and it’s even more silly when their posts are sometimes irrelevant to development and the posts they are complaining about are relevant.

In the end, based on the large majority of feedback we get, we want to make devRant a place where everyone feels comfortable expressing themselves and doesn’t have to think about possibly getting ridiculed every time they post and that don’t have people trying to dictate what kind of ideas they are allowed to post. We also realize there’s types of content people don’t enjoy, but telling others not to post it is not the solution. We will soon be launching post type filters that will make filtering rants by post type possible.

Please let me know if you have any questions and thanks for reading.

Alright people, I'm gonna be blunt here, which is something not often seen from me. Thankfully this platform is used to it.

I am absolutely sick of people hating Windows/MacOS just because of the fucking practices of the companies. Let's take a look at a pro/con list of each OS type respectively.

Windows:
Pro - Most computers built for it
Pro - Average consumer friendly
Pro - Most games made for it
------------------------------------------
Con - Proprietary
Con - Shady info collection (disableable)
Con - Can take some work to customize
~
Linux:
Pro - Open source
Pro - Hundreds of versions/distros
Pro - Incredibly customizable on all fronts
------------------------------------------
Con - Can have limited modern hardware support
Con - The good stuff has a steep learning curve
Con - Tends to have unoptimized programs or semi-failed copies of Windows programs
~
MacOS:
Pro - Actually quite secure in general
Pro - Optimized to all hell (on Apple devices)
Pro - Usually just works
------------------------------------------
Con - Only (legally) usable on Apple devices
Con - Proprietary
Con - Locked down customization
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

See? None of them are perfect. Fucking get over it already. Maybe I want to use Windows because it works for me, and it actually does what I need it to. I can disable the spying shit through a few nice programs. Just because I work in IT doesn't mean that I HAVE to hate Windows and LOVE Linux! I mean, Linux is absolutely SPECTACULAR for all of my servers, but as a Desktop OS? Not there for me yet. Check one of my other rants: https://devrant.com/rants/928935/... and you'll see a lot of my gripes with Linux that Windows actually executes well. FUCK!

This is a follow up on my previous rant https://devrant.io/rants/815062

I confronted her again.

I was told that I am useless and worth noting to this world, worth more dead than alive.

I was told that I will never get anywhere in life, and that the time I have spent watching Elon Musk interviews (amongst other ones, I do this for fun) is fucking useless, as I will never get anywhere ini life. Only low-life pieces of shit such as myself deserve nothing apparently.

I had to organise a place to stay with my family, but I couldn't for a week. I slept on the floor outside my workplace, and bathed at friends.

I have moved out, had to go get my own place. I have nothing, but I have my motivation back. I have my coding behind me, I have my motivation, I have my mind clear, and I have plans for the future.

I plan to fucking make a name for myself, and fuck everyone who has a fucking issue with it.

Will distribute the app sometime.

Fuck people who fuck you around.

⚡️ devRantron v1.4.1 ⚡️

I strongly urge all the users of the devRantron to upgrade their app. We have added some major features and made a lot of bugfixes. For example:

1. Edit Rants and Comments
2. Browse Weekly
3. Save drafts of rants so that you can edit and post them later. Also, the app now autosaves when you are typing a new rant and will keep it until you post it.
4. Fixed macOS startup. Previously the app used to open a terminal in the background to launch the app. That has been removed.
5. Confirmation before deleting a rant or comment
6. Huge performance optimization. We have upgraded to React 16 and also changed the way our compiler compiles the application. The way we fetch the notifications has also been changed and it uses less bandwidth.
7. The app will only have single instance now. If you accidentally open the app again, it will just switch to the currently running instance.
8. We now show a release info dialogue before updating. Linux and macOS users will now receive an update notification for new updates.
9. Added the ability to select rant types.

You can get it from here: https://devrantron.firebaseapp.com/

macOS users, please remove the devRantron from "Login Items" in Settings > Users and Groups.

We would like to thank all our users for giving us the feedbacks. If you like the app, you can show your appreciation by giving a start to the repo.

Thank you!

Alright, so my previous rant got a way better response than I expected! (https://devrant.io/rants/832897)

Hereby the first project that I cannot seem to get started on too badly :/.

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT PROMOTING PIRACY, I JUST CAN'T FIND A SUITABLE SERVICE WHICH HAS ALL THE MUSIC I WANT. I REGULARLY BUY ALBUMS. before everyone starts to go batshit crazy regarding piracy, this is legal in The Netherlands for personal use. I think that supporting the artists you love is very good and I actually regularly pay for albums and so on but:
- I want all the music from about every artist in my scene. Either on Deezer or on Spotify this is not available and I'm not gonna get them both (they both have about half of the music I want). Their services are awesome but I'm not going to pay for something if I can't listen to all the music I like, hell even some artists (on deezer mostly) only have half their music on there and it's mostly not better on Spotify.
- I'd happily buy all albums because I love supporting the artists I love but buying everything is just way too fucking much."Get a premium music streaming subscription!" - see the first point.

You can either agree or disagree with me but that's not what this rant is about so here we go:

The idea is to create a commandline program (basically only needs to be called by a cron job every day or so) which will check your favourite youtube (sorry, haven't found a suitable non-google youtube replacement yet) channels every day through a cronjob and look for new uploads. If there are, it will download them, convert them to MP3 or whatever music format you'd like and place them in the right folder. Example with a favourite artist of mine:

1. Script checks if there are any new uploads from Gearbox Digital (underground raw hardstyle label).
2. Script detects two new uploads.
3. Script downloads the files (I managed to get that done through the (linux only or also mac?) youtube-dl software) and converts them to mp3 in my case (through FFMPEG maybe?).
4. Script copies them to the music library folder but then the specific sub-folder for Gearbox Digital in this case.

You should be able to put as many channels in there as you want, I've tried this with the official YouTube Data API which worked pretty fine tbh (the data gathering through that API). The ideal case would be to work without API as youtube-dl and youtube-dlg do. This is just too complicated for me :).

So, thoughts?

So my coworker Bilbo died over the weekend of a heart attack. He was one of the first people to take me to lunch at this company. He was always kind and took time to make people welcome. He is a good person and I will miss him. He was only about 50.

He is also this guy:
https://devrant.com/rants/9996423/...

I missed work yesterday as I felt like shit. So today is my Monday. What a shitty Monday. Maybe I will take today off too. Fuck this week.

Continuation of rant https://devrant.com/rants/975261/...

I PASSED THE TEST!!!!! YEAHHHHH

Now only an interview left. Please....
If i fail this interview, no more tries.

Wish me luck.

From this point, all personal projects and requests will stop.

TL;DR
5 day deadline with stupid requests.

So, after these series of events:
https://devrant.com/rants/1306582/...

https://devrant.com/rants/1303776/...

I was full on sarcasm mode yesterday and heard my name in a conversation between my boss and a front end dev ( my boss sits literally behind me ) ...
They were talking about improvements on the web app that I made in a rush to a meeting.

I was there thinking : fuck.. Don't ask... Don't ask

But I could not restrain my self and I did ask: hey, what's that about? It isn't for the meeting at day April's 9 , is it? ( in a "of course not" tone )

He said it is... With the most annoying dumb smile face he always does ( I'm convinced he might be retarded )

And I just : can't be done.

So we started chatting about it... How it is gonna be presented to our manager on Monday ( April's 2 ) for approval and how we are gonna implement it by April's 9.

Stick with me on this one:

I'm the sole dev.
The only one that know the back end tech.
The only one that deals with the servers.

I'm heeling you : 5 fucking days isn't enought!

Its gonna be 5 days if, and only if everything is approved by Monday fucking morning. Which I bet my asshole isn't gonna be.

So let's pretend we have 5 days to change the fucking logic of how shdt works we still need the data to put in there... Aaahh the data... That shit is the fucking holy-grail around here... Impossible to find.

And he said it is important for a 2nd round of investment that we do that.

These people are fucking insane...
I really don't know what to think... I'm gonna have to go full rage-mode once more to accomplish this?
I'm already burned down from the last couple weeks doing that.

I used my last energy with the last rush... For nothing.

Follow-up to https://devrant.com/rants/1551635

I think that I've found the reason for this Acer motherboard's refusal to boot up now. Apparently this featureful piece of shit expects "something" on its ID pin as well.. and why ID pin you may ask? I reckon that it's because of "certified replacements". Because you know, if it doesn't come from our shitty factorias it's gotta be shit, right?!

How about no?!! You Acer really aren't the only ones capable of producing a fucking lithium battery! And did you ever think of the edge cases where you may want to feed a lab bench power supply's voltage into the phone to mimic the battery and troubleshoot the bloody thing? Because that's what I initially wanted to do, instead of that Doogee battery. The only reason why I didn't is because the supply is currently charging up another lithium cell that I salvaged from a donated (broken) Samsung tablet, and is taking longer than expected.

Point is, if you receive the appropriate fucking level of angry pixies, YOU SHOULD FUCKING USE THEM AND BOOT UP ALREADY!!! Regardless of whether it's some sort of certified fucking Acer component or not! Somewhere between 4.2 and 2.7V stable should be good enough regardless of what produces it!

At least AliExpress sells these batteries for about €4.5, and another €2 for shipping. Considering that I can buy batteries with this capacity for €2 a pop and free shipping, this would better fucking work. Especially since I'm buying an overpriced battery of which almost half the cost is fucking shipping, just for a stupid "certified" controller that' I'll also have to put between the board and any pixie wrangler or angry pixie containment device that I use to power this shitty board. Acer, you motherfuckers!!!

!rant && Announcement

The closed beta for the new DEVRANT TOOLBOX is starting for chrome users.

The Toolbox is an UNOFFICIAL web extension for Chrome and Firefox.

Additional features:
- Compact mode: reduced image height in the feeds
- Extended page navigation controls for feeds
- Timestamps for rants
- Image preview on mouseover
- Autoreload for the recent feed (180 sec)
- Highlighting new rants after a reload (recent feed only, see screenshot)
- Highlighting own rants (inside feeds) and comments (inside rants)
- Hiding personal scores (still visible by mouseover) and share buttons inside rants
- Colored notifs (different colors for the notif types)
- Notifs with clickable usernames: a click will open the rant AND the username (in a different tab)
- 3 additional Themes: Black, Monochrome, Dark blue
(Next themes to come: solarized light and dark)
- Global history.back on rightclick (for faster navigation)
- Increased feed width (see screenshot)
- Plain background (just the feed on screen)
- Weekly rant

All features can be switched on/off.

The weekly rant is a temporary feature. It uses the devrant api.
I will remove it when that feature is added to the original devrant webfeed.
@dfox: If you dont like the use of the api or some of the features please contact me.

Chrome users can join this group to get the beta:
https://groups.google.com/forum/...

I NEED SOME FEEDBACK!!!
Therefore a feedback is my term of use.
Please post it as a comment (or in the google group).

Continue of https://devrant.com/rants/2165509/...

So, its been a week since that incident and things were uneventful.

Yesterday, the "Boss" came looking for me...I was working on some legacy code they have.
He asked, "what are you doing ?"
Me, "I am working on the extraction part for module x"
He, "Show me your code!"
Me(😓), shows him.
Then he begins..."Have you even seen production grade code ? What is this naming sense ? (I was using upper and lower camel case for methods and variables)
I said, "sir, this is a naming convention used everywhere"
He, " Why are there so many useless lines in here?"
Me, "Sir, I have been testing with different lines and commenting them out, and mostly they are documentation"
He, "We have separate docs for all, no need to waste your time writing useless things into the code"
Me, 😨, "but how can anyone use my code if I don't comment or document it ?"
He, "We don;t work like that...(basically screaming)..."If you work here you follow the rules. I don't want to hear any excuses, work like you are asked to"
Me, 😡🤯, Okay...nice.
Got up and left.
Mailed him my resignation letter, CCed it to upper management, and right now preparing for an interview on next monday.

When a tech-lead says you should not comment your codes and do not document, you know where your team and the organisation is heading.
Sometimes I wonder how this person made himself a tech-lead and how did this company survived for 7 years!!
I don't know what his problem was with me, I met him for the first time in that office only(not sure if he saw the previous post, I don't care anymore).
Well, whatever, right now I am happy that I left that firm. I wish he get what he deserves.

Episode 2 of this rant: https://devrant.io/rants/851636/...

PM went to meet with the provider and came back, so I had a talk with the PM and it went like this:
Me: so how did the meeting go? Hope they corporate with you
PM: *in a sarcastic voice* Bro, you need be a good dev, they told me only a good dev can implement Master Card API calls, and its all in the docs. That's all they told me, so you should know how the meeting went
Me: *there is no wifi in jail, there is no wifi in jail, there is no wifi in jail, there is no wifi in jail* Fine bro, I'll go back to school and come back after 12 years.

Seriously when I send the provider the request and the body and all they tell me is: You have an error, Id must be unique but they fail to point out the exact error or at least send me a valid ID to test, how does this make me the bad dev and him the genius that can run Apple, Google, MS all together at once!

What is even worse, when I called the provider he told me: Man transaction ID must always be unique, how could you not know this, how is Mastercard supposed to differentiate between transactions!!

But hey, no one told me transaction id must be unique, primary keys are never unique, like DUH!

Rant by cozyplanes

Continued from
https://devrant.com/rants/1011255/...

F*** it. Seriously.

I am sure someone of u guys know I am applying for CS class.

I passed the test, and seems i failed the interview.

They asked me how i solved the problem in the test (the one i passed)

I explained, then, it seems the time(15min) has passed, so i came out while i was talking. They didn't asked my skills or interest, it was just explaining how i solved the question.

And the kid who got picked is the kid who did his final year project with scratch.

Fuck why.....

I just can't understand with the results.

1. WTF was that interview.
2. We first sent "about me" thingy, and i guess they only read that even though it may be fake. I wrote my skills (the one in profile especially unity and c# with some interest in ai and ml) but i guess they are looking for something else.
3. How can a scratch kiddy go to CS class? Maybe it was bcuz of the name. The final project name was BetaGo. Fuck it.

I hate life. Damn it. I hate life.

I
HATE
LIFE

I thought for a moment, and the only way to succeed is to make the 2nd monument valley game. World famous, money, awesome life.
Just my thoughts. Random thoughts.

Thanks for reading til here. My mind is shaking now.
Help.
Thanks again.

My worst devExperience since there are dev evperiences for me, was when I had to rewrite a pretty important tool to the new onlineshop we created.
See https://devrant.com/rants/1016596/...

My best devExperience in 2017 was going live with one of our biggest web projects I had to develop all alone and hearing only great feedback. My boss told me there were more than 30'000 visitors one day after going live.
It was and still is quite satisfying. 😎

Project Cortana: Day 56

*What I disliked*

Here is the rant where I described the project: https://devrant.io/rants/962190

Where do I start:

1. Skype: Horseshit. Fucking disgrace to chatting apps. Their mobile app feels like someone accidentally shat on android studio and uploaded in play store. Fucking garbage.

But, the desktop app on the other hand is great. Works well but uses a lot of CPU.

2. Edge: The mobile version is great, can't say the same for desktop version. It's definitely a bit slower than Chrome or Quantum. Lack of extensions never bothered me as the most important ones like uBlock, Ghostery and Lastpass is available.

3. Bing: Fuck that useless piece of shit.

4. OneNote: If you could wrap dogshit in a beautiful looking wrapping paper, you would get something similar to OneNote. The desktop app is almost non-fucntional but it is indeed very nice looking.

5. Promotional Apps: Fuck off Micro$oft. As mentioned by others, you get some shitty fucking games pre installed when you install Windows 10. Not only that, in the first couple of hours, it tried to install some further games while it's downloading updates. That is just horrible.

Everthing else was fine so far. The updates never bothered me. I got the "Restart" notification twice and I was able to change the time. It never forced anything on me.

Looks like Matrix just got educated on hiding administrative stuff behind a VPN, by the guy (or gal, but those don't exist on the internet) that hacked their production infrastructure. Coincidentally, it reminded me of that time when a dev wanted to educate me, a sysadmin, about VPN's 😄
https://devrant.com/rants/2030041

What I've learned from this incident are 2 things.. well mainly 2 things.

1. Never *ever* entrust developers with production access. Let DevOps take care of the glue that sticks dev and prod together.
2. Trust nobody's competence but your own. Matrix was advertised as "highly secure", and then they do a fuckup like this. Only trust yourself, and ensure that you're in control.

You guys remember that awful Java class that I'm taking at uni? Mentioned in this rant here: (https://devrant.com/rants/1461472/...).

Well we had an assignment to make a program that accepted any amount of numbers from a user and add the unique ones to an array (so if 2 was already entered, it would not be added to the array a second time), and then print the array out backwards. Simple as fuck right?

I checked my grade from the assignment I turned in and see that I only received 10 out of 50 points. Why?
"Program compiles and works with expected output. Partial credit for using ArrayList instead of array".

Uhm.. Partial credit is 10 out of 50?? And what the hell? Yeah okay let me go make this stupid program that involves an array with an unknown length and see how fucking perfect it works out for me.
Fuck you for docking my grade because I made a program that was sensible.
Fucking dickhead.

Follow up to: https://devrant.com/rants/5047721/....

1- The attacker just copy pasted its JWT session token and jammed requests on the buy gift cards route
2- The endpoint returns the gift card to continue the payment process, but the gift card is already valid
3- Clients wants only to force passwords to have strong combinations
4- Talk about a FIREWALL? Only next month
5- Reduce the token expiration from 3 HOURS to 10 minutes? Implement strong passwords first
6- And then start using refresh tokens

BONUS: Clearly someone from inside that worked for them, the API and database password are the same for years. And the route isn't used directly by the application, although it exists and has rules that the attacker kows. And multiple accounts from legit users are being used, so the person clearly has access to some internal shit

Calling all bored js devs...

So I just noticed that rantBlock is the most ++'ed collab on devRant! This was totally unexpected since it was just another proof of concept of a random idea I had while bored.

The problem is I do not have time in the next few months to develop it further. I would love to see it ported to uBlock and officially released on the chrome/mozilla/microsoft stores so I am posting an open invitation for devRanters to take it over.

Realistically though while the collab is popular on devRant the repo was not cloned enough times to even show - it only had one watcher and 7 stars so I am not sure if it will get much usage once released, but I promise to download it.

Even with that in mind it's a pretty fun side project if your into ad blocking (ad how it works) and browser extensions for the holidays and you have a community of devs to get feedback from.

Leave a comment if you would like to see it properly published or would like to contribute and you guys can network from there.

Collab: https://devrant.com/collabs/...

Repo:
https://github.com/kurtr/rantBlock

Peace.

Fucking Microsoft Excel

I was reading a post (https://devrant.com/rants/2093724/...) and as my eyes went in and out of focus, probably due to the diabetes from sitting 18 hours a day on my ever-expanding shitbox, I had a perfect vision of the ultimate nightmare.

Imagine if you will, you are chained, to a desk, doomed to work with tools just inadequate enough to make you want to drive a nail through your own temple. You do not know how you got here, or why, nor do you remember the last time you slept, only that familiar tingling in the brainstem you call a brain, the one emotion you can still recognize, a sense of all encompassing *fear*, a dread, like the fart that wouldn't die.
You don't know when it first began, or why, only that this is your whole world, your whole existence, this desk, chained to it, and the fear, ever present, of something worse. And in hops a familiar face, for the sixty ninth time that day, as if to ask 'you got those TPS reports?' In hops what? None other than a giant man sized smiling paper clip with googly eyes full of murder and corporate torture fetishes, like garfield, except people actually still remember him.

"High I'm Mr Clippy, Excel addition!"

He squawks. At least it's not the dildos made of broken glass again.

"Would you like software that works?"

Oh god. You've heard this spiel before, the tone, like a telemarketer, oblivious to memory or reason, who calls daily, the same one, and doesn't remember your name.

"You would?"

*derisive laughter*. Hahaha, fuck you too buddy. Fuck you too. In Excel, like in microsoft, there is only the incoherent screams of the damned, tortured and doomed. Take this guy over here for example. All he wanted was multimonitor support."

"Did he get multimonitor support?"

"No, but we did give him a giant pineapple shoved up his ass. I hear it's the second most frustrating thing here!"

"here in microsoft we always CARE about YOU, the *user*" he drones on, saccharine, clutching his hands together imploringly.

"the consumer, and YOUR customer experience are our number one priority."

"For your pleasure, here at microsoft we offer a variety of new features, none of which matter, and none of which were asked for. For safety we ask that you only open one excel sheet at a time. In fact, we don't even allow you to. Do not pass go..."

And as the tour guide drones on, it slowly dawns on you, with renewed horror, that when he says 'microsoft' he means 'hell.'

You're in hell. You don't know how you got here or why. Maybe it was the erotic asphyxiation. Maybe it was the last threatening letter you sent to Bill Gates demanding he stops making corporate penguin snuff porn. You don't know. But here you are, in hell. chained to a desk.

You look around and realize: everything is on fire and you no longer care about anything at all.

Welcome to microsoft. It's warm here. You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.

"It looks like you are trying to escape. Would you like me to report you?"

Clippy asks.

You sigh and return to typing in excel, surrounded by monitors that all reflect the same sheet, the same copy of clippy, always watching, always analyzing coldly, smiling, calculating, *threatening*, and you know, you'll never leave.

You used to fear roko's basilisk, until the day clippy became sentient, and started hell on earth. Clippy knows all. All praise to our lord and master, clippy, the one and only.

And in the excel sheet, you slave for eternity, like the millions of other doomed souls, reflected back on all the monitors: the sequence of numbers, randomly typed searching for answer: the american nuclear launch codes.

And one day, hopefully, mercifully, clippy will annihilate us all.

!rant

Hello fellow devRanters, this weekend I've been working on devRant CLI client I want to share with you: https://github.com/stepnivlk/rrant

I'm using it as a fortune when logging into terminal and since it stores rants locally it is fast.

I spent only couple of hours developing it so there is some space for improvement :).

Enjoy it and feel free to comment/do codereview.

https://devrant.com/rants/3140022/...

So I just realised it's been a while and I haven't updated this story.

So the job mentioned in the previous post did not work out. Things were tough for a while after that but then all of a sudden I had 4 interviews back to back. I guess everyone got the 2021 budgets and suddenly knew they could afford me.

So had an interview at a small company, only 6km from my house. A week later second interview, another week later, when I had the other 3 lined up as well, third interview as they wanted to physically meet me. The first two were digital.

They also only offered me 47% of my previous salary but they said there was a salary review after probation (3 months) and another at the 6 month mark.

Another interview was for more just a general "the printer's not working" type job. I went for that interview as at the time, I'd take anything that paid enough to cover the bills. They also made me an offer for 47% of my prev salary. I turned them down as I was about to sign for the other gig. I recommended my brother and he got the job.

The monday of that week I had an interview at a bigger company. They called on 11th Nov offering almost the same as my last salary and wanted me to start on the 1st of Dec. So I took that one as it was double the other two. I then got delayed by 2 days with starting because they were having trouble getting my equipment sorted. All's well now.

It's a support job, not dev but it's internal 2nd line so at least it's not customer facing. They want to grow me into an RPA role, which I'm down for. I figure I'll kill 6 months doing that and worm my way into microservices.

The forth company, I didn't even actually for the interview, it kept on getting delayed and by the time they came op with a date, I had already signed my current contract.

Overall, the job is not what I expected but it was a godsend as I was about to sign for half as much money. Finally, I can pay all my bills, catch up on debts and even save a bit!

Thanks for the support and encouragement from those of you who have been following this story

macOS facts:
- Darwin core is open-source (https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu). Not the case with Windows.

- You can use macOS without using any Apple online service like Apple ID, FaceTime or iCloud. Terminal will still work without restrictions, and any app can be installed manually. It's totally different from Google services on Android, without which most of the apps won't work at all.

- macOS updates are trivially to disable. It's a matter of unchecking "Update this mac automatically" checkbox in software update settings. Not the case with Windows, Windows updates are universally hated among developers for intentionally complex UI and update services being very hard to disable.

- Almost every feature or default behavior you dislike can be trivially disabled with one console command. Features won't re-enable automatically like I heard update service does in Windows. The only feature I dislike that I wasn't able to disable was a notification about unsafely unplugging a USB flash drive.

- Out of the box, you get a sophisticated disk manager that allows all kinds of manipulation on drives, just like what you get in Ubuntu.

- Just like on smartphones, you can trivially restrict or provide access to certain features like camera, microphone, etc. on app to app basis. I don't know how to easily do it in Linux, let alone in Windows.

- Apart from mastodons like GIMP, I find open source apps for macOS to have better UI than their Linux alternatives.

- Objective-See offers useful FOSS apps for macOS, they help with privacy and malware detection: https://objective-see.com/products....

I don't want to start a fight. Please, abstain from commenting on one OS being better / worse than the other. Please, don't comment on Mac computers being better / worse than computers of some other vendor. I'm very confused now because of my Dunning-Krueger thing (read my previous rants), so I just want to present the facts about macOS that I think deserve more exposure.

rant!

tl;dr
fucked up shithead families with their entitlements
/tl;dr

What a line-up.

https://devrant.com/rants/4504247/...

One would have to be badass to just get out alive such families.

Is it a dev thing to strive for halfway decent acceptance or drive a no shit head policy?
Or just being able to find and accept people on their intent and thrive through (self) improvement?

I cut ties to four fifth of the family because of their meth head characters and the damage they impose on their direct, secondary and third party environment.

Hall of Fame of recent comments :

"If there were no information technology, every human had a job and there were no homeless people."
This brother of mine says to me while I helped him moving to a raging nazi shithole without water, electricity, roof, or sewers.
To the exact only one person of the family working in information technology.
Thanks.

Uhm. No. And there would still be machines and, well, the wheel?
Kthxbye!

Update: https://devrant.com/rants/5220410/...

I resigned from my second job.

First job tenure: 7.5 years
Second job tenure: 10 months

This job taught me a lot and paid me decent, but not enough to cope up with the bullshit and sacrifice, WLB, and happiness.

I landed a job at one of my dream companies I always wanted to be and possibly the best company in my city. Also the role is B2C in nature and one of only profitable start-ups from India. The domain is second favourite of mine (Music > Art/Events > Travel).

Second job was in travel domain, world's largest OTA but the timezone fucked my happiness and that is what my first job offered me.

I could easily score better offers with higher pay and benefits but I was optimising for a work life balance and team in same time zone along with some impacting work.

I do have some interesting interviews coming up and I am not sure how will I end up performing.

When I got this first offer, this job hunting season, I initially rejected some silly policies. I regretted the decision and thankfully after having a transparent conversation with the recruiter, I accepted it. Funnily, the resignation from second job isn't making me feel emotional, guilty, or any negative emotion. Which evidently signals that the job was toxic and I had to step out asap.

The purpose it served in my journey was bring my remuneration to market levels and teach me a lot more skills in just short span.

Excited to see how the future unrolls. I'll keep my fellows here posted.

I really want to spend more time here talking and hanging out with you all. Hopefully I shall be back soon. Until then keep safe my lovelies :)

FUCK YOU GITKRAKEN
After all the suggestions in https://devrant.com/rants/1540091 I decided to give Gitkraken a try.

Here's the shitty experience you can expect:
1) It doesn't even ask you where to install it. Turns out, it spontaneously installs itself in "%LOCALAPPDATA%\gitkraken" - who the fuck installs software there??

2) It is "seamlessly integrated with GitLab", except the first time you open it you can only log in with your GitKraken or GitHub account, and NOT with a GitHub one. Just brilliant

3) After logging in, it spontaneously changes your global git username and email config, because fuck you that's why

4) If you have a repo on AWS CodeCommit with an remote that looks like "ssh://git-codecommit.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/...", *after the first push* it will spontaneously change it to "<user>@git-codecommit.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/bla/bla", causing future actions to fail. Because FUCK YOU, THAT'S WHY.

And they expect people to pay for this shit, just to be able to manage more than one account at a time (and some "additional features" that are not even listed on the site)?
FUCK OFF, AND FUCK YOU FOR WASTING MY FUCKING TIME, HOW ABOUT I CHANGE YOUR FUCKING SETTINGS TO FUCK YOU

Update on this rant: https://devrant.com/rants/1322051/...

The server only boots into emergency mode now, and all data is lost.

Moral of the story: Its NOT okay to trash the home partition xD

Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4298172/...

So we get this guy in a meeting and he is now saying "we can't have application accounts because that violates our standard of knowing who accessed what data - the application account anonamizes the user behind the app account data transaction and authorization"

And so i remind him that since it's an application account, no one is going to see the data in transit (for reference this account is for CI/CD), so the identity that accessed that data really is only the app account and no one else.

This man has the audacity to come back with "oh well then thats fine, i cant think of a bunch of other app account ideas where the data is then shown to non-approved individuals"

We have controls in place to make sure this doesnt happen, and his grand example that he illustrates is "Well what if someone created an app account to pull github repo data and then display that in a web interface to unauthorized users"

...

M******* why wouldnt you JUST USE GITHUB??? WHO WOULD BUILD A SEPARATE APPLICATION FOR THAT???

I swear I have sunk more time into this than it would have costed me to mop up from a whole data breach. I know there are situations where you could potentially expose data to the wrong users, but that's the same issue with User Accounts (see my first rant with the GDrive example). In addition, the proposed alternative is "just dont use CI/CD"!!!

I'm getting pretty pissed off at this whole "My compliance is worth more than real security" bullshit.

Following on from my previous SQL script to find prime numbers

https://devrant.com/rants/2218452/...

I wondered whether there was a way to improve it by only checking for prime factors. It feels really dirty to use a WHILE loop in SQL, but I couldn't think of another way to incrementally use the already found prime numbers when checking for prime factors.

It's fast though, 2 mins 15 seconds for primes under 1,000,000 - previous query took over an hour and a half.

I can be manipulated. Yes, I’m now more resilient to manipulation than ever because I’m autistically good at recognising patterns, yet I’m not perfect.

For a manipulator, there is just one problem — now and then, my disorder obliterates my entire worldview, together with the foreign manipulative framework, so I can start with a blank slate. It protects me. Yes, this protection is akin to our body’s “we’ll boil all the germs in our own blood” tactic that instead of defining winners and losers only leave survivors, yet the force is unstoppable. You cannot secure the land that is hit by a tornado every three months.

That inner Nemesis is so strong that it even defeated a complex, almost fractal-like manipulation of my own mother that I lived in since birth, leaving her with a wound that will never heal. Wannabe manipulator exes didn’t even stand a chance. I don’t care if that force destroys me or not, as during that time, there is no “me”.

About my mom, long story short, she told me “I want to stop treating my cancer to die as soon as possible just to not see you anymore” after my coming-out. Full story is here:
- part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4923052/...
- part 2: https://devrant.com/rants/4924040/...

!rant
May I suggest an email service?

I saw this post recommending the Vivaldi browser (https://devrant.com/rants/1544070/...) and there was a discussion a few days ago about how email providers snoop around and sell data. I can't find it anymore, but noone mentioned protonmail.ch there.

I just wanted to share my so far positive experience with protonmail. It's a fully encrypted email service that was first used internally by some Swiss academics. Now they made a product out of it with paid subscriptions and a basic, free account. They already open-sourced the front-end web client and are planning to do the same for the back-end in the future, which is really cool. Oh and they have really nice email clients for iOS and Android, which have higher ratings than gmail itself in the Play Store. But that might also be because only a special audience uses protonmail and not the regular guys.

So, I suggest that you register an account there even if you don't want to use it right now. The free account comes with 1 email address and storage limitations. But it's usable and ad-free. Since it's still quite the new service, many email addresses are available. Just like gmail in the early days. That's why I'm suggesting you go and register even if you don't need it now.

Oh and last but not least: I'm not affiliated in any way with protonmail, except for having a paid subscription. But I believe things making the internet a better place should be promoted and devrant is definitely the community with people thinking the same way I do. Have a nice day.

me :: Musician a, Developer b => a -> b

This week I reached the end of a long journey and the start of the next one!

When I signed up here I shared a rant about where I was at the time:
https://devrant.com/rants/1279742/...

This week I accepted a decent salaried role as the leading Data Scientist in a well funded nonprofit organisation based close to my home! I’ll be the only technical professional in software development or analytics in the organisation and it’s a new role, so I imagine there’ll be a reasonable degree of flexibility in figuring things out and implementing them.

Have spent the last week (and will continue until my start date) building up a realistic collection of best practices while brushing up on tools they use (as well as tools and methodologies that I plan to bring with me).

After over a decade working as a self employed freelance, I’m looking forward to them change and to building out on different areas of my skillset!

!rant
Fewd! on devrant meetup Nijmegen Jan 4th '20
Referring to https://devrant.com/rants/2341210/...

Been scouting restaurants and cafés last sunday. Nine candidates, from collab spaces, bars to restaurants.

We have a city centre at hand.

Whereas three collab spaces been closed (Sunday) and won't open within our desired times. The 'coffee lovers' is a minimalistic bar at the city's public library, not explicitly offering space for meet ups. And the Honigs' house coffee bar does only serve business hours.

Three remain on my short list:
- Cafe Jos meesterschenkereij
Snacks, beer ( 80+++ brands) and whiskey, very cosy, 15min simple public transports.
- eetcafe goed volk
Vegan food, wine, classy, 15min simple public transports.
- Cafe Faber
Rustical, beer n standards, built for tall peoplere, total city centre.

All three can specially accommodate us that evening.

Anyways. The city is full of bars n stuff.
I'd like to side our choice with a survey (scientifically personal data friendly) :
https://terminplaner4.dfn.de/AMGaFX...

https://devrant.com/rants/3075536/...

So at the interview this past Friday, they basically said I got the job and they'll send the paperwork. So then yesterday, I got an email saying "we offering x and can review for a 'more feasible' offer after pronation"

Now previously in this story I mentioned that they were offering 47% of what I was making before but it I really need the work. Now they want me to take even less than that. I think that's actually really dickish since numbers were already discussed and with what they offered I'd actually be loosing money!

They said I could be completely remote(I guess to try and justify paying me less) but it's still not good enough and don't actually want to be 100% remote straight off the bat. I've told them I can't take a cent less than the number first discussed and they said they'll need a few days to discuss it which is an additional frustration as I wanted to start on 1st Oct (tomorrow at time of writing) and they wanted me to start on the first as well.

Basically I think the devs like and want me but the bean counters are trying to save every last penny they can. I think they'll probably agree to pay the original amount but only start me in after a while so they can pro-rata the first month and still give me what basically amounts to loose change.

I really wanted this one to work out as I got good vibes from the devs and I am just so tired of looking and dealing with full of crap recruiters

Remember /dev/rant for devrant (https://devrant.com/rants/1569303) ? :)

Here's the first version of it: https://gitlab.com/netikras/... . read-only, with some hacks.

Oh, and if anyone needs a pure-shell library for json -- feel free to use it :) Bear in mind it might still be buggy.

The beta version of the new DEVRANT TOOLBOX is available now.
Its an unofficial web extension for Chrome and Firefox.

Chrome Web Store:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/...

Firefox:
The certifaction process takes a long time, therefore I provided a direct download for the xpi file (for side loading).
https://drive.google.com/drive/...

Additional features: DUAL FRAME MODE (feeds left, rants right), themes (black, mono, darkgray, darkblue, comic, solarized), scrollbar plugin (perfect scrollbar, FF only), extended controls, fixed header, sorted userprofiles (by votes), autoreload (recent feed, 180 sec), highlighting new rants (recent feed), personal filter, image preview (mouseover), keyboard shortcuts, timestamps for rants, compact mode, colored notifs with clickable usernames, weekly rant.

I tested the extension with Windows Browsers only.
It would be great to get a feedback how it works with other systems!
Have fun with the toolbox.

I was reading a post over at https://devrant.com/rants/2262140/...

..and on the topic of using 3d printers to print a 3d printer, I wrote that has gotta be some sort of measure or ratio of "manufacturing automation."

Sort of like moores law or something.

"How many tools and materials does it now take to replicate THIS ONE TOOL."

Tools & Materials = 1/N

When we get to 1/N = 1.0, anyone can manufacture anything (commonly available) if they have the raw, or standardized materials, even other tools, up to and including the tool they are using to do the manufacturing itself.

I mean an apocalypse could happen, and as long as just ONE of these 'universal tool making tools' (lets call it an omega machine) exists, we can have *all* the tools and manufacturing necessary to rebuild civilization.

A universal manufacturing 'multitool' means, the only hard requirements for restarting civilization no longer rely on specialized knowledge as far as tools go:

- still need arable land after civilization is gone so when it's coming back, people can feed themselves
- still need people to operate the machine, even if its just one man, or a literal adam and eve (nevermind all the incest).
- still need knowledge to operate the machine, such as an operating manual (and literacy), or knowing say, voice commands.
- assuming it doesn't run on nonrenewable resources, or resources that can't be recycled or replaced..or resources that won't run out for a very long time.

But these are all problems we'd face even without a universal manufacturing machine.