Since the beginning of my coding journey at Flatiron, I have been researching job opportunities in my area. I have job alerts set up through Google, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor; not to mention the rabbit holes I go down researching pretty much any company I come across in my daily life. I am very good at collecting data, not so good at organizing it. This is where my idea came from for my Rails Portfolio Project.
I aimed to create an easy to use, helpful organizational tool to track all of the job opportunities the user is interested in, as well as the tasks associated with each. My main goal was to prioritize all of the users tasks from all of their opportunities and show the user just the top 5 upon logging in. This would provide a focused to do list allowing the user to accomplish the most urgent tasks first without wading through a million and one to do’s and making a decision about each (decision fatigue folks).
The initial phase of this project was the hardest for me personally. I had such a clear idea of what I wanted to build, but I needed to make sure it met the requirements. I used draw.io to diagram my schema and sought out the advice of one of the section leads during open office hours. Once I had confirmation that it ‘could’ work, I got started building. I knew that my commits would be graded this time, so I worked hard to focus on building one thing at a time. It was such good practice for me and it made the whole project seem easier. Especially because I decided to change a couple relationships and even create a new database table along the way.
I made use of every study group possible over the course of my project build. Even if I didn’t have a specific issue or question, I hopped on and hung out. Every single time I learned something new! Mega props to the rails section leads for the self paced software engineering students, they make asking for help a breeze and they work so hard to get you the help that you need. I also leaned on Google quite heavily, especially when I started styling my application.
I used a Bootswatch theme for my first attempt at Boostrap, it was actually pretty fun! I definitely have a ways to go in the front end department but I learned a lot by just diving in headfirst. I am pretty satisfied with how my project turned out overall and I know that I will use it in my job search upon graduation.
In the future I hope to implement one of my stretch goals which is a feature to show the user how well their qualifications match the qualifications of the opportunity. Either with a progress bar or circle with a percentage, something like that. I think I have the knowledge and resources to add the feature now, but I’m already beyond MVP and I’m excited to start javascript!
Project Walkthrough: https://youtu.be/JxAdVX4cDMM
Github: https://github.com/ortufte/job_hunter