Update on my devRant client SwiftUIRant:

I’m experimenting with some UI changes compared to the official app.

* vote buttons are laid out horizontally and placed above the rant to not waste space on the left side.
* comments count shows 0 comments instead of disappearing.
* rants are not cut off but visible in full length (I plan to add a toggle setting for that)
* creation date/time is present in the feed
* date/time formatter uses the current system region and the language english. So no more awkward American dates for non American users.

What do you think?

Switch your tech stack or programming language or development framework to something that you enjoy more.
If it requires to switch the company, do it!
If it requires to learn something new and you think that you don‘t want to, then it‘s probably the wrong goal.

I’ve started a new devRant iOS client with SwiftUI.

https://github.com/WilhelmOks/...

I’ve watched the Vsauce episode about rotation again the other day.
The one where Michael explains how gyroscopes were used to measure the rate of rotation of the earth.
And I realized that this is another nice proof against the flat earth crap.
And it should be easy to test, too.

Somewhat related, the cloud formations due to the coriolis effect can be seen as a proof (for the globe) as well.

What is the "Stories" section (second bottom tab) in devRant? It looks like regular rants but grouped differently? I don’t get it.

Mentions are broken again

!rant
Loving the the fact that constructors in Swift (initializers) can fail (returning null/nil) and be async.

In C# there is no other way than using static methods instead.

Devs: Hey, what should we do?

A:
provide our SDKs for download as easily as possible so that any potential customer can try it out and see how much better we are compared to our competitors?

Or…
B:
Should we lock our SDKs behind a login where the customer needs to create an account and enter the most amount of private information possible, just in case, then also require to create some security access tokens that he needs to configure in his app to have access to our service via the sdk and also hide all of the documentation behind a login which requires some permission based roles to access and also make the sdks closed source so that it’s a pain in the ass to debug and understand?

Marketing people:
B! Definitely B! Make sure to piss off and annoy our customers as much as humanly possible!

!rant
So, Rust again.
When I learned that Rust doesn’t support inheritance, only traits (interfaces), I was shocked at first.

Then I tried to remember when the last time was that I have used inheritance in the code that I write (not the code that I use).

And I could remember an instance some months ago. But I also remember that I was very unsatisfied with that design and refactored it to use composition instead. And it was much better.

One of Rust’s properties is that many good practices in other programming languages are enforced rules in Rust.
And in case of inheritance, it seems like Rust decided that composition over inheritance is such a good practice that it should be a rule.

I’m not 100% convinced that there never will be cases where inheritance is better. But I still like this radical idea of forcing the devs to do it "the right way" in the majority of (if not all) cases.

I think many devs will disagree.
What do you think?

Looking further into Rust, the macros are quite sexy. My first reaction was "omg really"? But then I learned that macros in Rust are nothing like macros in C++.

Again, comparing with my favorite language Swift, it feels like Rust macros are somewhat similar to result builders (formerly named function builders). Or they they have a similar purpose. Both evaluate to some type safe result at compile time and are a perfect tool to make DSLs.

But Rust’s macros can do even more than that. It’s truly amazing.

Wondered what that checkmark on a youtube channel means. Googled it. The summarized official answer:

Most used open source project?

Swift

!rant
I’ve just looked into Rust a bit deeper and was absolutely stunned by how many things it has in common with Swift. The Syntax, the features, the concepts, the "philosophy".

Previously I thought that Kotlin is what comes closest to Swift.

Anyway, Rust seems like a beautiful language and it’s no wonder that it is one of the most loved languages out there!

The compile time index out of bounds errors blew my mind!

God damnit Quora!

I stumbled upon some article or post or whatever they are called on quora.
And I really wanted to read the comments on it. It wouldn’t let me unless I log in.

I normally don’t do that but I thought I’ll make an exception because I really wanted to read the comments.

So I clicked on that comments button and logged in (via google). First it presented me some modal dialog to pick 5 things that interest me. And it was mandatory. Fine… I picked those 5 things.

Finally it presents me the list of articles or whatever. But not the same list that I have seen before I was logged in. Scrolling, the article of my interest is not there. God damnit! Just show me my comments for fucks sake.

I go back to that tab where I was not logged in to somehow copy the link of that article or the link to the comments section. But it doesn’t let me. Some bullshit pseudo smart layer of crap is preventing me from doing anything.

Then I abuse the fucking share link to visit it in my logged in tab to finally see the comments that I came for.

And the comments weren’t even worth it. God! What a waste of time! And how can one fuck up a fucking forum so much?

It will be a lesson for me not to visit Quora ever again.

"BUSCAR TODO"

This Spanish translation for "SEARCH ALL" just tricked me into thinking that a translation is missing 😅

Got this design for a button.
Now I'm writing an essay in the ticket about how this is problematic for localization and accessibility.

Imagine seeing words like developer:ess, member:esses or user:ess in artices on the web becoming more and more popular.

Pretty dumb, yes?

That’s what happening right now with the German language with something called gender-language.
It hurts my eyes reading Entwickler:innen, Mitglieder:innen and Benutzer:innen.

People argue that words like Entwickler are excluding woman by using the male form by default. But it’s just a matter of perspective. Why not just define this as the neutral form just like in english? Developer is neither male nor female. Everybody is fine with that.
Yet the Germans are messing around with this gender shit and making text unreadable for no reason at all.
It’s just bullshit!

Today I‘ve been investigating a freeze in our app. It took me many hours to narrow it down to the textfield validation regex. And it turned out to be a "catastrophic backtracking" issue.
I‘m a regex noob so I don‘t have a clue how it occurs exactly. But I‘m a bit perplexed about what a seemingly innocent regex can cause.

For me it became another argument against regex now.
I‘ve rewritten the regex into readable code and the freeze is gone.

I could try to fix the regex but… nah. The code is better anyway.

A && (B || C)

Is there any way to get rid of the parenthesis?

I know how to remove the OR but the parenthesis are still there:

A && !(!B && !C)

English is weird.
Take the double oo for example.
There are so many different pronunciations for it and there seems to be no rules whatsoever.

mood
wood
blood
door

All different

"I use arch btw"

Now I can say it too.

(On the mac, using the terminal)

arch -arch x86_64 gem install

Sometimes, using git feels like performing a particle experiment in physics.

When I have some added lines staged for a commit, then remove those lines and stage it too, the changes annihilate into no changes at all.

Lines add and lines remove is like particle and antiparticle.
The energy that is released upon annihilation is equivalent to the joy of having a clean commit with few changes.

Binary searching my way through the git history to find the commit that broke something. 😄

!rant
It‘s just amazing how much a proper type system and a modern language makes refactoring a good dev experience.

devRant is messed up!
I often open the app (iOS), see a rant that I want to read, tap on it, and the app crashes.
Now I almost got used to that shit but for some reason when I open the app again, that rant that I wanted to read is gone! Never to be found again!
No matter how often I reload, how much I scroll down, it’s simply gone.

This annoys me more than it should maybe. But seriously, wtf is wrong with this platform? I don’t know if it’s only the iOS app but so many other things are broken here, it’s disturbing. And those problems are there for many years, nobody seems to care. 😩

Don’t get me wrong, I like devRant. It’s the only social platform that I use. But… ugh…

Me, talking to a colleague:
"No, thats impossible. The problem can not be in my code. Let me show you why. You see, the code does this, and than it goes here, and then… oohhhh…. I’ve found the bug."

I want to replace Windows with Linux on a very old Notebook. It‘s for my father who uses it only for web browsing and Skype.
Can you recommend me a distro?
I think Ubuntu should be fine but I don‘t know.

Scrolling to the bottom to "load more rants" doesn‘t work anymore.

I don‘t get notifications about @Mentions anymore.

Noticed a few days ago and today in the iOS app.

Fucking Windows sporadically gets into an endless loop of playing the sound of a USB device plugged in and out. It requires one or two reboots to fix it. I’ve tried everything, nothing else helps.