Job Application Tracker

Web Interface

Inspiration

Trying to find a tech internship this year has been rough. You apply to every company on the planet and only hear back from a handful of them. Keeping track of all these applications can be a nightmare.

What it does

Whenever you apply for a job, our tracker extension records your application. All of these applications can be viewed on a status page. When you receive emails related to that job they will show up grouped under the job application. The job applications on the status page are sorted from most recently updated (just applied or received an update email) to least recently updated for convenience. It will also scan the emails to detect if you have been rejected and color the application red.

How we built it

The Chrome extension is built in pure JavaScript with no build system. The backend is written in Java with the Jetty 12 web server framework. The backend uses Google's APIs to read emails from the user's inbox. The frontend is built with min.css and is rendered server side in the Java backend. The data is stored in a MongoDB database.

Challenges we ran into

A large challenge was parsing the job application websites. Another challenge was dealing with Jetty having a mind of its own and wanting to rewrite query params very badly for some reason. A final challenge was designing APIs that were easy for the frontend to use.

(Also chrome decided that it was going to refuse to run and I had to install it through nix to run the extension)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how usable the interface is, and that the extension can just work silently in the background once it is set up. We are also proud of the fact that we completed a decent MVP during the hackathon. We have a highly scalable app built on top of mongo and can service any number of clients.