Job Hunt Assistant is a webapp built to help with the process of looking for a job. It provides fast input sources and some views that greatly improve the picture of the full job hunting proccess.
The app has a dashboard view, with relevant information. A kanban view for quickly assessing the status of the current job lead and status updating. A list view for more throrough analysis and automatically grabs employee given ratings for a company and shows the map of the office to assist on choosing the right place.
A live demo of the app can be accessed on Heroku and the code on GitHub.
Technologies
- Ruby
- Ruby on Rails
- PostgreSQL
- HTML / CSS / JavaScript
- Sass
Implementation Details
The back-end is based on Ruby on Rails version 6.0.0.beta1 and Ruby 2.6.1. The front-end uses Bootstrap 4.3.2 and FontAwesome 5, with plain ERB templates. The database is PostgreSQL.
To add listings, the app uses Selectize.js and Rails Ajax forms to allow for quick and seamless adding of the Company and Technologies without requiring the user to change to another view in order to create those entities first. Selectize allows the dropdown to show the existing options or to create and select a new one on the fly, which is great for usability.
The kanban view uses Rails’ UJS capabilites to seamlessly process Ajax requests and return snippets of jQuery to udpate the UI.
To get the ratings for the company, I used the Nokogiri Ruby gem inside a plain object to just perform a simple web search and try to find any ratings returned. The scraping is naive and assumes the first rating result will be the most accurate. For that reason, the app allows the user to override the rating automatically found by the app, then it will only use the rating entered by the user.
For the company view, the app uses a simple Google Maps Embed API to search the address entered by the user, if any, to display the expandable map. Since the goal is to allow for easier checking of commute times, the map can be expanded and explored freely.
The dashboard gathers important and interesting information to display to the user in a nice, compact view.
The project is fully tested and was developed with the Test-Driven Development mindset, achieving, at this point, 99%+ code coverage.
Job Hunt Assistant is deployed as a demo app at Heroku and on a local Vagrant VM with Capistrano and Passenger.