What is the recommended way to build my own LMS Android app...?

(I have a bunch of videos in various languages that I'm thinking I could provide via a app with inbuilt quizzes, grades, course tracker, etc.)

The Official DevRant User Leaderboard is Here, It is a list of all "Discoverable" users on DevRant. While making this Rant, various interesting facts were discovered, The Top 1000 list is available here https://gist.github.com/theabbie/...

The Top 100 will be featured here, Results in Comments,

Hey everyone,

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!

We had a bit of a slow year in terms of devRant updates, but we gained some momentum towards the end of the year and we're looking forward to carrying it into 2020. Recently, we launched what I think are our coolest new avatar items yet (https://devrant.com/rants/2322869/...) and behind the scenes we got our iOS/Android apps on the latest version of the frameworks we use, which will help us continue to improve stability. Still, we definitely would have liked to do more, but we're optimistic the coming year will bring great things for devRant.

One thing we are very proud of is this year we had our best year ever in terms of platform stability and uptime. Despite the platform growing and our userbase growing, we had almost no complete app downtime even though our infrastructure is minimal. A large part of this is thanks to devRant++ supporters, who allow us to maintain a small but effective tier of infrastructure and redundancy.

In the coming year, we're going to launch one of our most ambitious initiatives yet, and we're also going to continue to improve the devRant experience itself. We want to try to gather more user feedback, so we'll be working on a way to do that too. Stay tuned, more on this stuff coming soon.

As always, thank you everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community! And thank you to our awesome devRant++ supporters for continuing to be the main drivers to keeping devRant up and running.

Looking forward to 2020,
- David and Tim

The first time I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was when I met the smartest dev I've ever known (to this day).

I was hired to manage his team but was just immediately floored by the sheer knowledge and skills this guy displayed.

I started to wonder why they hired outside of the team instead of promoting him when I found that he just didn't mesh well with others.

He was very blunt about everything he says. Especially when it comes to code reviews. Man, he did /not/ mince words. And, of course, everyone took this as him just being an asshole.

But being an expert asshole myself, I could tell he wasn't really trying to be one and he was just quirky. He was really good and I really liked hanging out with him. I learned A LOT of things.

Can you imagine coming into a lead position, with years of experience in the role backing your confidence and then be told that your code is bad and then, systematically, very precisely, and very clearly be told why? That shit is humbling.

But it was the good kind of humbling, you know? I really liked that I had someone who could actually teach me new things.

So we hung out a lot and later on I got to meet his daughter and wife who told me that he had slight autism which is why he talked the way he did. He simply doesn't know how to talk any other way.

I explained it to the rest of the team (after getting permission) and once they understood that they started to take his criticism more seriously. He also started to learn to be less harsh with his words.

We developed some really nice friendships and our team was becoming a little family.

Year and a half later I had to leave the company for personal reasons. But before I did I convinced our boss to get him to replace me. The team was behind him now and he easily handled it like a pro.

That was 5 years ago. I moved out of the city, moved back, and got a job at another company.

Four months ago, he called me up and said he had three reasons for us to meet up.

1. He was making me god father of his new baby boy
2. That they created a new position for him at the company; VP of Engineering
and
3. He wanted to hang out

So we did and turns out he had a 4th reason; He had a nice job offer for me.

I'm telling this story now because I wanted to remind everyone of the lesson that every mainstream anime tells us:

Never underestimate the power of friendship.

code review

And on Fridays we all say together...

✨
✨ DON'T ✨
✨
✨ PUSH ✨
✨ ✨
✨ TO ✨
✨
✨ PRODUCTION ✨
✨
✨

My girlfriend is amazing:

After a long uphill battle trying to finish a huge open source project I started months ago. She noticed I was getting a little deflated.
So she donated a small amount to the donation page to lift my spirits.
She wanted to do it secretly but didn't know that it wasnt anonymous.

The little things spur us on.

~During app demo to our client~

- And when you click here the request will be submitted, the admin will be notified.
*App crashes*
- And of course the app will close itself since it's the end of the process.
- Client: That's good
- Me: ⊙﹏⊙

I think I’m a bit unusual in that my favorite place to code is on the couch, just using my laptop. During the work day I use two monitors, but I find it more comfortable to just use a lap desk and laptop when I get home/on weekends. I’m not sure if it’s from laziness or whatever, but it seems to work.

EDIT: devRant April Fools joke (2019)
-------------------------
Hey everyone!

Today, @trogus and I are very happy to announce a devRant feature that we’ve been working on for many months. After extensive time and money investment, it’s finally here! Introducing, pixelated avatars!

@trogus came up with this awesome idea about a year ago, but we couldn’t get it just right so we had to tons of work/research to make those pixelated avatars give the full sense of retro and ULTIMATE pixelation. We think everyone will appreciate how this effort turned out.

Anyway, let us know what you think, and we hope you enjoy!

p.s. here is @trogus’s avatar - the model we used to make sure the feature is perfect!

Today my current company fuck itself.

We were in negotiations about the end of my contract/mission, I want to quit to create a company around AI.

And the actual chairman said to me "You think too highly of yourself. I could find a tenth of people to replace you so shut up and take what we offer".

30 minutes later they received my resignation. 1h after that, the 15 dev under me resigned (after two year working with us they are clearly under paid). At the end of the day, the Head of product and the two good PO resigned.

This morning I get an email, talking about suing me as I made everyone resigned and asking for a meeting.
So I went to the meeting with a lawyer, they weren't expecting it. Boring legal stuff came after that.

And the funny fact: at the end of the meeting the CIO, chief ops and the SRE resigned as well.... As they didn't want to have the run it without all the team...

Funny day :)

Last month the main product, 90% of the company use it, was launched. And in three months 80% if the IT profiles will be out...

My mom never touched a PC or smartphone. Well, most people didn't back then, because it was the early 90s.

But I brought a borrowed SNES to the hospital and taught her to blow on the Zelda cartridge if it didn't work. She died after we finished the game.

After that my dad bought me a commodore 64, the machine that taught me about electronics and programming, and molded me into who I am today.

On the first date with my girlfriend (now 12y together) we just sat talking for hours in her room, playing Zelda on her SNES taking turns, and I told her my mom would have liked her.

Not my mom, but my girlfriends grandmother. I told her that I am a software developer, a guy who makes the programs which run on computers.

She became really excited about that, because finally she found someone to repair her 40-year-old radio. I told her that I have no fucking idea about radios, but she did not want to hear that. So I looked at the case, randomly pushed some buttons and again told her, that I could not find the broken part, let alone repair it. But she didn't listen and told me to open the case and look inside.

Sighingly I opened the radio, looked at the inner parts and told her once more, that I don't know anything about this stuff. She told me to look more closely. About to lose my mind about this pointless task, I finally told her, that "the transistor" is the problem and that the best thing she could do is to throw it away and buy a new radio. She was happy with that answer.

*In a team meeting*

Me: *happily jotting down notes in markdown*

Other guy: "Dude what are you doing? Pay attention."
Me: "Umm... I'm taking notes?"
Other guy: "But why does your MS Word have black background?"
Me (a bit lost): "Umm... That's not Word. That's my text editor."
Other guy: "Alright... But how do you convert your notes into Word then?"
Me: "... I don't."
Other guy: *stares at me*
Me: * stare back*

It was a nice conversation.

!rant
Selected at a better college
@ceee @Floydian @RememberMe

Remember what I told you more than a year back on that Skype call?
I fucking did it

I know sex is cool but have you ever entered BIOS with only one key press?!

Do not close lid!

Too much work kills your brain cells.

Respect ++

be like a neural network

My basis path set does not include this one...

This is really epic 🤣🤣🤣

This is from a book I'm reading right now! I found it funny :-D

Pattern: What is a chaperone?

Shallan: That is someone who watches two young people when they are together, to make certain they don’t do anything inappropriate

Pattern: Inappropriate? Such as . . . dividing by zero?

Hey everyone,

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!

Tim and I wanted to reflect on the year devRant has had, and looking back, there are a lot of awesome things that happened in 2018 that we are very thankful for. Here are just a few of the ones that we thought of (this list is not exhaustive and I'm definitley forgetting stuff, so please comment about those!):

- After nearly a year in the making, the completely overhauled devRant web version was launched (https://devrant.com/rants/1255714/...)

- @linuxxx became the first devRant user to hit 100,000++! (https://devrant.com/rants/1157415/...)

- We once again pulled off the greatest April fools joke everrrr (https://devrant.com/rants/1311206/...)

- @trogus started making awesome devComics and http://devcomics.com was launched

- We added a feature to allow rant filtering by post type (https://devrant.com/rants/1354275/...)

- We made it so avatars could have expressions! (https://devrant.com/rants/1563683/...)

- We had a booth at TechDay New York and got to meet some devRant users! (https://devrant.com/rants/1394067/...)

- We made major backend architectural improvements - including spinning up a special high-powered-CPU web server to handle avatar creation and make the creation process much faster (https://devrant.com/rants/1370938/...)

- App stability: mainly Android - we fixed crashes, did a push-notif overhaul, and tried to continue making the apps better and more stable

- A record amount of devRant meetups were held, and we couldn't be more proud about that, and we thank every person who organized one! (just a few: https://devrant.com/rants/1588218/... https://devrant.com/rants/1884724/... https://devrant.com/rants/1683365/... https://devrant.com/rants/1922950/...)

We had a busy year, and despite some things going on for us personally and some setbacks around those, we think this was a very productve year for devRant and that we are going in the right direction. We're continuing to constantly evaluate feedback from members of the community to decide where to take the app next. We're fully committed to improving the devRant community in 2019 and we have a lot of ideas about how we can do that. We're working on some things, but we're not really announcing them yet, so please sit tight for those :) In the meantime, feel free to let us know what you'd like to see improved/added the most as we always like to get updated feedback from the community.

As always, thank you everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community!

Looking forward to 2019,
- David and Tim

Hey y'all! It's been a while since I logged in.
But I'm back with a dev jingle, just like last year:

Jingle bells,
Batman smells,
Look how my code compiles,

Oh what fun, it is to see,
No reds in my console!

😑

Happened a while ago but I still find it funny.

*phone rings*
Me: good morning sir, how can I help you?
Client: MY WEBSITE IS OFFLINE, FIX IT RIGHT NOW.
M: I'm going to take a look, what's the domain?
C: *gives domain*
M: I see, that domain expired already, it was cancelled through our customer portal by the client, you maybe or someone you know?
C: WHAT?! MY INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS DEPENDS ON THAT DOMAIN, I'D NEVER CANCEL IT, THIS IS BULLSHIT! I'F THE SITE GOES OFFLINE FOR A MONTH I'LL FUCKING GO BANKRUPT, YOU'RE GOING TO FIX THIS RIGHT NOW.
M: if I may ask, how is your business doing right now?
C: HOW IS THAT QUESTION RELEVANT RIGHT NOW?!
M: well, you said that if the site would go offline for a month, you'd go bankrupt. The domain registration ended about half a year ago so that's why I aske......

*beeeeep beeeeep beeeeep*

Well, okay then.

This is a view from a rooftop in NYC that I sometimes get the pleasure to work from. I really like the view and it’s pretty quiet usually. It also overlooks one of my favorite buildings, the Empire State Building.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone else’s desks, setups, and remote/outdoor workspaces.

We’ll be featuring them on our recently launched devRant Instagram account, devDesks (https://www.instagram.com/devdesks).

Go big or go home.

Adding back light for my arduino drawer...