IT Jobs - Url Shortener
The birth of the IT Jobs Url Shortener; whenever I try to teach myself a new technology or technique I need to just do it or just use it because just reading about it or even creating a practice application doesn’t work for me. I never seem to run into the real problems or issues by doing so. The best and fastest learning goes through actual projects.
No real problems, no real learning.
Now this does not mean I don’t like to do code kata’s or koans to practice my coding and problem solving skills, but these are all very small and very dedicated towards a single goal. The things that I like to use real projects for are usually bigger; f.ex. learn a new language or understand a type of architecture.
Ruby
So I wanted to learn Ruby and the ecosystem that it is surrounded by. This required a real project because as I mentioned before I would fail otherwise, mind you I will probably still fail but that is a whole different story.
The annoyance
Job sites have always annoyed me a lot; bad usability, as an IT person I know they could do much more for me. Also figuring out whether a job and company would be a good fit for me (and the other way around) is very hard on those sites. Usually I would only find a job posting and then I would open Google to start researching the company and the people working there.
Now I know that going the social way to find work will be a more accurate way to find something that would be a good fit. Asking people you know or being asked by people that know you yields much better results. Hence the practice of many companies to give a bonus when someone finds a successful new hire. They know that if an employee is recommending someone that the chances of success are higher then when a random guy is responding to the job ad. An other reason for this is of-course that many people will not even look at a job board when searching for a new job.
But this is not known or practiced by everyone, and that’s where I hope to make life just a little bit easier for both people looking for work (also for contract work) and companies looking to hire people. I’ll discuss the details in a later post.
A job site for IT people
So I found my project, but to make it real I had to give it a real home, which in my little world means a place on the internet, a domain name. And I have gone over many possible domain names, and as always all the good ones are taken … until I ran into the .BS (Bahamas) domain extension. Then suddenly a lot of things popped into my mind, talk.bs, nomore.bs and facebook.bs (yeah that last one was obviously already taken). But after finally leaving this juvenile behavior behind me again I found my solution:
Please welcome http://itjo.bs/ to the internet!
Now that I found a home for my project and in the mean-time a design as well (via 99 Designs) I could start coding. And that is what I did, I started out using Sinatra, then went to Padrino and finally now I am using Rails 3. And the same with databases; CouchDb, MongoDB and now Neo4j and Redis. With each framework I ran into different problems/issues and I now have a much better feel for what would fit where. All tho I am sure things will change again.
But the project didn’t move forward very much, this has many reasons and many of them actually lie outside of the project itself (i.e. moving and stuff like that). I felt that I wanted to deliver something related to it quickly.
So I started thinking what would be the easiest and quickest thing I could release as a stand-alone service (i.e. valuable thing on its own).
IT Jobs Url Shortener
I figured an Url Shortener service would fit that description. It was something that was in the pipe-line anyway, I mean the domain itself is ideal for it.
Think about it; if you have an IT position on your website or somewhere else and you want to link to it on Twitter or in your e-mail (why do longer urls break so often in e-mails anyway?). So you need to shorten it, then why not use an url shortener that clearly shows to whom sees it that it is about an IT Job. Much better then using any of the other good url shorteners. F.ex:
What’s this link that Joe just send me now? http://itjo.bs/123 Hmmm maybe I shouldn’t open this at work …
The works
Considering that I already had the design and the domain ready it only took approximately 1 day of figuring things out and building it.
And this is what making it real means to me, now people can actually be using the product, no matter how small it is. Now I can build upon this small service and start adding more functionality/value.
And in the mean-time I hope this service is catching on a little bit so that when I release more functionality I also have an user-base that is potentially going to use that new functionality.
The technique
So the longer story is that you can find the code on GitHub: https://github.com/MarkNijhof/itjobs-urlshortener
The short answer is that I am using Sinatra on Heroku and using Redis for data storage.
Finally
ATM running the site is not costing me anything, but I sincerely hope that that will be changing soon (because of increased traffic). So please use the service and tell me what you think. Also if you have things that you have always wanted on a job board (be it as an employee or employer) then let me know.
So just go to: http://itjo.bs/