I'm going for longest rant. TL:DR; version here:

http://pastebin.com/0Bp4jX9y

then:

http://pastebin.com/FfUiTzsh

Twat Client,

As per our conversation, here is an invoice for the work you requested on behalf of U.S. Bloom. I realize that you ended up going with another designer, but you did request samples of what my take on the logo design would be. The following line item is indicative of 1 hour of graphic design consultation as per your request via Skype.

As I recall, you mentioned that this is not how Upwork "works" but considering it was you who requested that I converse with you via Skype instead of via the Upwork messenger, and since there were no clear instructions on how to proceed with Upwork after our initial consultation, It is assumed that you were foregoing Upwork altogether to work with me directly, thus the invoice from me directly for my time involved in the project. I would have reached out to you via Skype, but it seems that you may have severed our connection there.

After spending a little time researching your company, I could not find current information for Basic Media Marketing, but I was able to reach out to your former partner Not A. Twat, who was more than helpful and suggested that he would encourage you to pay for the services rendered.

It is discouraging that you asked for my help and I delivered, but when I ask for compensation in return for my skills, you refused to pay and have now taken your site offline and removed me as a contact from Skype.

{[CLIENT of CLIENT]},

I am sorry that I have bothered you with this email. I copied you on it merely for transparency's sake. I am sure that your logo is great and I am sure whatever decision was made is awesome for your decision. I just wanted to make sure that you weren't getting "samples" of other people's work passed off as original work by Twat Media Marketing.

I can't speak for any of the other candidates, but since Twat asked me to conduct work with him via Skype rather than through Upwork, and since he's pretty much a ghost online now, (Site Offline, LinkedIn Removed or Blocked, and now Skype blocked as well) one has to think this was a hit and run to either crowdsource your logo inexpensively or pass off other artist's work as his own. That may not be the case, but from my perspective all signs are pointing to that scenario.

Here is a transcript. Some of his messages have been redacted.

As you can clearly see, requests and edits to the logo were being made from Jon to me, but he thinks it's a joke when I ask about invoicing and tries to pass it off as an interview. Do you see any interview questions in there? There were no questions about how long I have been designing, what are my rates, who have I done work for in the past, or examples of my previous work. There were none because he didn't need them at this point.

He'd already seen my proposal and my Behance.net portfolio as well as my rates on Upwork.com. This was a cut to the chase request for my ideas for your logo. It was not just ideas, but mock designs with criticism and approval awaiting. Not only that, but I only asked for an hour of compensation. After looking at the timestamps on our conversation, you can clearly see that I spent at least 3 hours corresponding with Twat on this project. That's three hours of work I could have spent on an honest paying customer.

I trust that TWATCLIENT will do the right thing. I just wanted you guys to know that I was in it to do the best design I could for you. I didn't know I was in it to waste three hours of my life in an "interview" I wasn't aware I was participating in.

Reply from ClientClient:

Hello Sir,
This message is very confusing?
We do not owe your company any money and have never worked with you before.
Therefore, I am going to disregard that invoice.

Reply from TWATCLIENT's boss via phone:

I have two problems with this. One I don't think your business practices are ethical, especially calling MY client directly and sending them an invoice.

Two why didn't you call or email Jon before copying my client on the email invoice?

Me: Probably because he's purposely avoiding me and I had no way to find him. I only got his email address today and that was from a WHOIS lookup.

Really, you don't think my business practices are ethical? What about slavery? Is that ethical? Is it ethical to pass of my designs to your client for critique, but not pay me for doing them?

... I'LL HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK!

My email follow up:

http://pastebin.com/hMYPGtxV

I got paid. The power of CCing the right combination of people is greater than most things on Earth.

2017 Recap + DEVBANNER !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

1. So, let's recap my 2017 first. It was awesome
Here is some list that I can remember
- finding my hobby (fsx, vatsim)
- finding computers aren't genius
- creating a new language
- major improvements in my unity skills
- found out i am friendly
- getting a job at google in a dream
- creating my banner in krita --> devbanner collab :D
- Logo creation fail
- CS class apply fail
- getting free stickers for the first time of my life
- getting death threats (lol)
- finishing my first ever big c# project
- got offensive words from a bot that i am a f***ing d***head.
- getting downvotes after creating such a shitty meme
- getting my rant featured in twitter
- finding that my friends love my game
- getting a sneak peak at the src of devrant
- coding with turbo c
- not using git cuz too lazy
- finds out msdn is god
- slowly hating unity, but likes it cuz it is using c#
- reaching level 2 in google foobar
- started 100+ projects this year and finished about 6 of them.
- devRant motivated me a lot

2. devBanner stuffs
So, how it all started is when I wanted to create my own logo. Some people will remember it. The one with arrows and cozyplales written on it. Then, I created my own banner with Krita (their text tool sucked). After that, due to some suggestions by the community, I decided to create a collab. From then, many people contributed to the devBanner project. Special thanks to @Kimmax for his awesome prototype of the frontend made during I was sleeping.

Now, before I talk more, I want to talk something. I don't post a rant about my collab cuz i want to get upvotes. I just want more people to use this simple creation software. You can literally use them anywhere, and it is FOSS.

Well....
If you want to create again, you can do so at https://devbanner.center

If you want to contribute, please do so by visiting https://github.com/devBanner

We are looking for a skilled frontend dev who can do the basic web stuffs. (we don't use frameworks currently for our frontend)

---------------------

Thanks everyone for making 2017 awesome. Can't wait to welcome 2018. Happy new year everyone, and I will drop my banner here.

For those are interested in devBanner project, here is the keynote.

All api calls will be made in
https://devbanner.center

Temporary frontend is available at
http://bashlord.com/devrant-banners

Concept frontend available at
https://cozyplanes.github.io/dB-UI

Contribute to the project at
https://github.com/cozyplanes/...

Docs coming soon!
Current:
https://cozyplanes.gitbooks.io/devb...

We are looking for a frontend developer and logo designer. If you are interested, reach me at cozyplanes@tuta.io (send questions here too)

Questions? Send via email (reply in 24hrs) or comment below by mentioning me.

Cheers!

I built a chrome extension that brings a digital rubber duck to your browser for debugging, companionship and laughs - the perfect companion for a dev. :)

The logo was inspired from Devrant's ducks too, and the project is open source.

You'll find the GitHub repo here - https://github.com/rameshaditya/...

Do give it a star if you like it, that would make my day! :)

There has been a post today about the existence of too many js frameworks. Which reminds me of this awesome post https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels...

At first I thought someone was corpseposting, as it is my understanding that the js ecosystem is calming down a bit. But then I noticed that post got almost 20 upvotes. So here's my thoughts:

(I'm not sure what I'm ranting about here, as it feels kinda broad after writing it. I think it's kinda valid anyhow.)

I'm ok with someone expressing frustration with js. But complaining about progress is definitely off to me.

How is too many frameworks a bad thing?

How does the variety and creation of more modern frameworks affect negatively developers?

Does it make it hard to understand each of these new frameworks?
Well, there's no need to. Just because it has a logo and some nice badges and says it will make you happy doesn't mean you should use it.
You just stick to the big boys in the ecosystem and you'll be fine for a while.

Does it make you feel compelled to migrate the stack of every project you did?

Well, don't. If you don't like being on the bleeding edge of js, then just stick to whatever you're using, as long as it's good code.

But if a lot of companies decided to migrate to react (among others frameworks), it's because they like the upsides: the code is faster to write, easier to test and more performant.

In general, I'm more understanding/empathic with beginner js programmers.

But I have for real heard experienced devs in real life complain about having to learn new frameworks, like they hate it.
"I just want to learn a single framework and just master it throughout my life" and I think they're lowering the bar.

There's people that for real expect occupying positions for life, make money, but never learn a new framework.

We hold other practitioners to high standards (like pilots or doctors), but for some reason, some programmers feel like they're ok with what they know for life.

As if they couldn't translate all they learned with one framework to another.

Meanwhile our lives are becoming more and more intertwined with technology and demand some pretty high standards. Standards that historically have not been met, according to thousands of people screaming to their devices screens.

Even though I think the "js can be frustrating" sentiment is valid, the statement 'too many js frameworks is bad' is not.

I think a statement like 'js frameworks can go obsolete very quickly' is more appropriate.

By saying too many js frameworks is a bad thing you're
1) Making a conspiracy theory as if js devs were working in tandem to make the ecosystem hard,

But people do whatever they want. Some create packages, others star/clone/use them.

2) Making a taboo out of a normal itch, creating.
"hey you're a libdev? just stop, ok? stop"
"Are you a creative person? Do you know a way to solve a problem in an easier way than some famous package? it doesn't matter, don't you dare creating a new package."

I'm not gonna say the js world is perfect. The js world is frantic, savage, evolves aggressively.
You could say that it (accidentally) gives the middle finger to end users, but you could also say that it just sets the bar higher.

I liked writing jquery code in the past, but at the same time I didn't like adding features/fixing bugs on it. It was painful.

So I'm fine with a better framework coming along after a few years and stealing their userbase, as it happens almost universally in the programming world, the difference with js is that the cycle is faster.

Even jquery's creator embraced React.

This post explains also
https://medium.com/@chrisdaviesgeek...

https://microsoft.com/store/apps/...
the pet project I thought would take 2 weeks but took waaayy longer -.-
critique it?
Known issues:
tries to get dimensions from the width, works half the time, will make a setup process in the beginning eventually and allow people to change the values.
Background download, lockscreen and wallpaper all use different methods, trying to see which one works better, doesn't use a separate background process by itself hence easier on the system resources.
the "dismiss" is there just so the notifs carry images in phone. Somehow, notifs with just images and no buttons didn't show the images on phone, hence a temporary workaround, will be replaced with actual buttons later :p
Search and sketch don't work the way I want em to, are there but not accessible, will be there eventually.

tips? things I should change? anything?

And not the final logo, took it from a sample package to submit it, will tinker with the logo thing later :p
//first UWP

TLDR;
Side project update.

Made simple nlp library in python and published it’s first version to open source.
Now I can feed it with parsed pdf text.
See rant https://devrant.com/rants/2192388/...

Why ?
Cause during reading book about nltk I couldn’t find simple extendible way to provide support for polish language and I wanted to abstract stemming, word normalization, tokenizer etc. so I can provide ex. different conditions for separate text files and don’t write much code what is an asset when you work solo.

It’s about 12GB of pdf public accessible law data I am trying to handle ( at first ) which is about 35000 files from last 90 years.

So far I automated downloading web pages and pdf documents from them. Extracting data from web pages and saving it to database. Extracting text from pdf files. I have about 5-6 projects to do all of it above maybe at the end I will put it to some workflow manager like Luigi or just run it by cronjob.

First thing for website version 1.0 part is find correlation between all documents inside law text using nlp library by building custom conditions. Then just generate directory structure and html files with links between documents.

Website version 2.0 is already in my mind but it will be creepy to make it and will take at least 1-2 months and I want to publish fast.

I have some pdfs with only images instead of text and tesseract worked quite good with them so maybe I will try to process them when everything go live.

Learned a lot about pdf as now I know that font in pdf is not always providing unicode characters ( stupid form of obfuscation) so when you extract text you need to build glyph vector to text map for every font.
Pdf is full vector representation - just like svg - what is logic if you think a bit and know that some printers are running using postscript.

Let’s hope next update will be about flutter mobile app which started all of shit above. It’s almost ready ( except getting data from api I am trying to do and logo for release version ). It’s last piece of puzzle.

https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland

I thought I was hallucinating for a while.

It's a gif.