Boomerang

Inspiration

Recently, a string of layoffs have affected a large number of the working population. All those people were suddenly told to pack up, and now they have to look for new jobs. It's been all over the news, especially in the tech sector - Meta, and more recently, Twitter. Also, the freezing of new hires in so many companies like Google, Microsoft etc. have made it even harder to find job listings. Well, we decided to something about it.

What it does

We created a job portal that aggregates job from different portals - of which we're focusing on the two most popular ones right now, i.e., LinkedIn Jobs & Indeed Jobs. You can search for job postings across these portals all at once, in one place, at ease. Then, if you find an opening interesting, our backend API provides links to go directly to the job application pages. Boomerang is like a shortcut back to the work industry for people who've been let go.

How we built it

We used React, Rapid API and Express.js. We created a frontend with a large table of jobs cached or searched from the provider APIs, and accumulated them under different tabs for people to look at for their specific search results. We connect the frontend with an Express API that returns cached or fresh results and processed and sent them back to be formatted on the frontend.

Challenges we ran into

• We tried scraping the job data from portals, but many websites have CloudFlare's bot screening, so we had to fall back to looking for & using APIs
• We ran into multiple errors like rate-limiting, bad requests, exceeding developer quotas, parsing and combining results from different APIs, and displaying them together in a tabbed fashion.
• We also ran into a few problems deploying our backend on Azure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• We cached results from the APIs so users wouldn't have to make multiple calls and block out the API usage quotas.
• We read up on the expansive Azure documentation together, and were able to successfully spin up entire VMs to support our backend infrastructure.
• We battled sickness, remote collaboration issues, network problems and still were able to make a working solution.

What we learned

We learned how to create Virtual Machines on Azure Portal, and deploy an Express.js server on it. We also learned about the Promises.all() and associated batch async function processing methods. Lastly, we understood how exhausting combining different APIs can be, and in our case, LinkedIn and Indeed were pretty dissimilar but for the project had to be put together.

What's next for Boomerang

We want to add even more job listing portals to our collection, and make a larger set of data for all users to explore. We'd also like to create a resume matching system in the future, one that can appropriately match people to their preferred and interesting jobs.

Built With

• express.js
• rapidapi
• react
• tailwind