Coffee machine is down

Resist the urge to punch some of my co-workers.

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

Sorry if I'm being spamy, but this is really urgent.. For those of you who haven't read my situation, you can read about it here: https://patreon.com/colorsofapril/

tldr:
I'm broke, I can't work (mental reasons), and I'm about to be kicked out of where I live...

Even worse, my sister (whom I'm staying with) tells me last night that she's out of money as well, and our balence is almost out for our power.. (Thus, our power will go out soon if we don't get some money... in winter...)

I'm getting really worried now 3:

If you are able, please consiter sending me a donation via paypal (not Patreon atm, because they will hold it until January)

http://paypal.me/TheCyaniteProject

Sorry for the spam...

Me: junior dev

Assignment: build a REST search service that also does (thing x)

Me: gosh I just can't figure out how to make (thing x) work! Nothing I try works and there are no online resources!

*goes to meeting with client*

Client: (thing x) is impossible in our application, so we are expecting (much more manageable thing)

Me: awesome! I think I can build that

Manager who can't code: what are you talking about, (thing x) is clearly better and it should be possible to do

Manager: *sends email outlining shifted requirements after the meeting, including (thing x)*

I hired a woman for senior quality assurance two weeks ago. Impressive resume, great interview, but I was met with some pseudo-sexist puzzled looks in the dev team.

Meeting today. Boss: "Why is the database cluster not working properly?"

Team devs: "We've tried diagnosing the problem, but we can't really find it. It keeps being under high load."

New QA: "It might have something to do with the way you developers write queries".

She pulls up a bunch of code examples with dozens of joins and orderings on unindexed columns, explains that you shouldn't call queries from within looping constructs, that it's smart to limit the data with constraints and aggregations, hints at where to actually place indexes, how not to drag the whole DB to the frontend and process it in VueJS, etc...

New QA: "I've already put the tasks for refactoring the queries in Asana"

I'm grinning, because finally... finally I'm not alone in my crusade anymore.

Boss: "Yeah but that's just that code quality nonsense Bittersweet always keeps nagging about. Why is the database not working? Can't we just add more thingies to the cluster? That would be easier than rewriting the code, right?"

Dev team: "Yes... yes. We could try a few more of these aws rds db.m4.10xlarge thingies. That will solve it."

QA looks pissed off, stands up: "No. These queries... they touch the database in so many places, and so violently, that it has to go to therapy. That's why it's down. It just can't take the abuse anymore. You could add more little brothers and sisters to the equation, but damn that would be cruel right? Not to mention that therapy isn't exactly cheap!"

Dev team looks annoyed at me. My boss looks even more annoyed at me. "You hired this one?"

I keep grinning, and I nod.

"I might have offered her a permanent contract"

Today we have an exciting devRant announcement! As many observant members of the community have problably noticed, since launch we've been using the domain name devrant.io since the .com was already taken. Today, we're happy to announce, we now own devrant.com and it is now the official devRant URL!

How did this happen you ask? The devrant.com domain was already owned by a developer named Wiard when we launched devRant. It took a while to track him down, but when we did, turned out he saw the good we were doing and wanted to help the devRant community by generously offering us the .com domain for a very reasonable exchange (considering that we are a self-funded bootstrapped startup!).

Since Wiard recently started writing a blog on devrant.com, he had to find a new home for it. His new blog is https://sysrant.com and I encourage everyone to check it out! Great topical/educational dev/sys-admin related articles? Check. Someone who cares about the devRant community and allowed us to leave the firey hell that is .io? Check. So check it out!!

Some technical info:

This change is immediate and all devrant.io non-api requests will now redirect to devrant.com. We might have missed a few things (purposely or accidentely) so we're going to be going through and converting anything that's left. If you use the devRant API, your implementation should not break since API requests are meant to be excluded for now, but I highly recommend switching any API URLs to https://devrant.com so you can avoid issues in the future if we decide to stop redirecting devrant.io API requests. Also one note, there was an issue for about a minute after we turned on the redirected where some API requests to devrant.io might have 301 redirected to devrant.com. If an app you were using broke, try clearing whatever cache the 301 redirect might be stored in and the issue should go away.

Feel free to post any questions you might have here (and please let me know about any issues you might discover!), and once again, huge thanks to Wiard!

A programmer once explained Nietzsche like this:
A long time ago, god created the world, but forgot to leave a developer documentation, thus the whole world was like legacy code...
And humans are like the end user of this world, and some among them spent time studying it, using the Moral API, hoping to get a result of "http 200 ok" from our world for the peace of mind. But the true operation of this world is still yet unknown...
As time passes, humans begin to find that in Moral API, good and evil are two base classes, and all the other moral properties (like ethic, justice and stuff) are just other classes based on those two classes through multiple inheritance.
One day, when programmer Nietzsche was observing the world's runtime behavior, he came up with a question:
"Did god really use good and evil as base classes? Could it be that they are actually derived classes?"
Most of the world is currently in the favor of mankind, and god must've wrote individual user cases for it's end users, he thought.
This made Nietzsche thinking: if end users are considered into two cases: the strong and the weak, how would the world be designed base on its user story?
Let's think about the strong, they can bully the weak as they please, and there's nothing the weak can do to stop them. In this case whether the Moral API exists or not doesn't fulfill the need of the strong.
But when it comes to the weak, Nietzsche thinks that because the weak cannot fight the strong, they need to belittle bullying and praise the strong for being nice. When the weak does this, it covers their powerless state to some extent, making them look somehow equal to the strong by being capable of commenting.
God might have coded the Moral API to fit the weak's requirement, also adding some public methods for the weak to comment on the strong. If the strong takes care of the weak, they call him nice and good, if the strong bullies people, they call him bad and evil.
That's when Nietzsche realized, that good and evil are both derived classes from the weak, and the base class should be the strong and the weak.
Then he started a series of studies about the Moral API, and got some thesis that persuaded lots of other end users...

So, someone submitted a 'bug' to Mozilla.

As some of you may know, in the next year, the new mass surveillance law in the Netherlands is going into effect.

Another fun fact is that the dutch security agencies/government have their own CA (Certificate Authority) for SSL/TLS certificates.

The new law says that the AIVD (dutch NSA/GCHQ equivilant) is allowed to hack into systems through obtained certificates and also that they're allowed to INTERCEPT TRAFFIC THROUGH OBTAINED PRIVATE SSL/TLS KEYS.

So someone actually had the fucking balls to submit a fucking issue to Mozilla saying that the Dutch State certs shouldn't be accepted anymore when the new mass surveillance law gets into place.

This person deservers a fucking medal if you ask me.

Visited my parents again today!

Arrived home.

Suddenly my sister starts to talk about the new dutch mass surveillance law and how it's all bad and the possible consequences.

😶😐😮

Normally I'm the one who says that and is told to shut up after a while.

I'm a proud brother!

Does anyone else suck at remembering tasks?

I love making and crossing out lists. Excuse my handwriting.

Dutch DevRant meeting was awesome! Talked a lot, had quite some drinks, had pizza and just fun in general!

At least one selfie was required imo so here it is :). Of course, we had to include Devy ;).

Also overlooked a comment from someone wanting their face censored so took the old post down and hereby an edited version.

So @Linux suggested to make a face revealing rant!

This is the face behind @linuxxx! post yours BUT only if you're comfortable with it :).

"If you design something to be idiot proof, the universe will design a better idiot."

A job that doesn't practice fear driven development

Was attending an AI meetup in Amsterdam yesterday and saw a fellow devRanter!

Memory Lane

I was really confused for a second as to why Redhat sent me a pizza...

Denial is not a river in Egypt...

Hello from Germany !
Meeting new, smart people doesn't seem to be a problem here :)

I think server down time is because of rain 🌧

At the ending part of the interview, I asked a final question to the HR.

Me: "So, what language is mostly used here?"

HR: "Since we're dealing with customers from different countries, English."

• Manager : WTF did you push, now it keeps crashing all the servers.

• Me : (silent, I'm trying to speak but nothing is coming out. Felt like someone in coma).

• Someone else shouts at boss : Now we now have 47 major crisis bridges​.

[I went running for the door to get away from everything.]

Only to find myself rolling on the floor tangled in my bedsheets after falling from my bed. Realized it was all but a nightmare.

Went to get some water. While taking the first sip...
Me: Shit, I'm late for work AGAIN.

Running for the door again. Then stopped to think if this is all some fuckin premonition. Hurriedly went for my phone to find out it's nothing but Sunday.

I'm thinking about a career switch now. No more devops once this is over.

I found this in the HTML for Hackerrank. I started laughing and thought you guys would enjoy it as well.

Microsoft tech summit... Doesn't need a comment

Happy Mothers Day!! - to all the devRant moms out there 😃 ❤ 💐

Confession: I am not a dev, I actually work on an IT helpdesk telling people how to turn on their PC's everyday.
It's soul destroying!!

My boyfriend is an Apple dev though, and I only joined DevRant to see if it would help me understand what he talks about 24/7...
I have very basic coding knowledge but still find this all so fascinating!
You guys are so smart, and can literally create anything in the blink of an eye.
Why are you guys generally so very under appreciated??
You also have a fantastic sense of humour! Haven't laughed at so many nerd-jokes in years!

Loving DevRant so far!
Keep up the great work! :)

Excuse me boss!

During increment time
Boss : There are 50 bricks on an Plane. If u drop 1 outside. How many
are left?

Employee : That's easy, 49.

Boss : What are the three steps to put an elephant into a fridge?

Employee : Open the fridge. Put the elephant in. Close the fridge

Boss : What are the four steps to put a deer into the fridge?

Employee : Open the fridge. Take the elephant out. Put the deer in. Close the fridge.

Boss : It's lion's birthday, all animals are there except one, why?

Employee : Because the deer is in the fridge.

Boss : How does an old woman cross a swamp filled with crocodiles?

Employee : She crosses it because the crocodiles are at the lion's birthday

Boss : Last question. In the end the old lady still died. Why?

Employee : Er....I guess she drowned....err...

Boss : No! She was hit by the brick fallen from the Plane that's the problem, you are not focused on your job....You may leave now!!!

Moral: If your boss has decided to screw u, no matter How much u prepare u will be screwed.

When someone uses a *switch* statement with only 2 cases

Tell people you love them every day because you don't know when it will be the last time.
But more importantly, don't forget to "git push" every day, because you never know when your laptop is about to die, taking with him those last commits. RIP my friend.