Ruby On Rails Job Search App

I’m very happy with how this productivity app came out. I’ve been using it to keep my job search organized. Feel free to download the code from my GitHub repository:

https://github.com/bbornino/ruby_job_search

This entire application is running on Ruby 3.3.0 on a Rails server. Right now, I have it running locally on my laptop. I tried getting Apache to behave on my Virtual Private Server, but it wouldn’t recognize any new document roots.

When the app is first loaded, the “home page” goes to the search sites. This page loads the list of sites using one of the JavaScript libraries that I have been using for years: DataTables.js. I like it for the features it easily adds: the sort, search, and pagination. I chose to make the one column worth of text clickable, even though in the past I’ve made the entire row clickable. Usually, I like to make what you click on immediately go to an edit…

Clicking on one of the row items pulls up a site detail page. On any particular day, I’ll spend the time on the one site, combing through jobs, and adding job postings I’ve applied to. I start adding a job posting on this page in that ‘Add’ section, which starts my edit for the particular posting I’m applying to.

Over time, I learned that not all search sites were the same. Some only did PDFs of resumes while others only did the form filled in resumes and others kept both. Also, some sites will include links for your GitHub account and project or portfolio links. Once you’ve been on a few sites, it can be hard to remember all of these differences, so this way I’m able to track that data. The rest of the fields within the Search Sites and Postings are pretty straightforward to use. Editing the Site looks like this:

Of all the pages within the application, editing and updating Job Postings is where I spend most of my time. However, there are still a few enhancements that I have been itching to address in an upcoming release. Many postings come really long and are usually marked up with bold, indent and… which would work really well with a WYSIWYG editor, like CKEditor. That technology stack field which I added well after initially creating the application has been a sore subject: there is no clear format or structure that I could easily use to track what I’ve been seeing (which is substantially different than what TIOBE reports).

What I really like about the data filled out for each field is the ability to run reports. I always do that directly within the apps that I write.

I think that my most commonly used report is the ‘Per Week Report’ which you can see at the top menu. Yeah, I might occasionally have a slow week, but this helps me track and keep my numbers up. I couldn’t think of a better way, off-hand, to make the report look nicer. Oh, how I miss my ‘Cardo…

The fall of 2023 may have been slow for recruiters as I don’t recall seeing what I saw in the spring of 2024: lots of Recruiters sending me emails. Some of them felt like duplicates. So I added the additional tracking portion to the application: “Email Opportunities”. Turns out, yes, at times I’ll get two different recruiters sending me the same posting. A handful of times, there were three sending me the same one. And other times, those two different recruiters were from the same company! Tracking this information enabled me to figure out what was going on and which conversation I had with each of the recruiters.

See my Ruby on Rails Blog Entries for my thoughts on this implementation.