DEV Community

Ahmed Yasser
Ahmed Yasser

Posted on

2 1 3 1 1

I couldn't find a job, so I made a SaaS by accident

Why are we still here?

It's my last semester until I get my CS degree, it's been four long years, but they're finally almost over, and while some may be happy or even excited, I've never been more miserable.

You may not care about the reason behind my misfortune, so I won't bore you with the details and give you the gist of it. I simply can't find a job.

I tried applying everywhere, local job postings, online forms, social media sites, I even tried reaching out to recruiters directly, but nothing worked. Hell, the days where I received a rejection email, I was even a little glad they bothered to reply to me, even if it may have been depressing at times.

So I decided to ask someone I knew, maybe there was something I'm doing wrong, I even wrote that I have a CS degree and a year of professional software development experience on my resume, despite not being a graduate yet.

But after a few more months of mindless applying, I again achieved nothing.

So, I decided to take a break from applying to jobs, partly because the finals of the semester were approaching at the time, but mainly because I felt drained, I even deleted LinkedIn from my phone, I just couldn't bring myself to even open the app, it felt exhausting.

The days continued to pass, and like every other semester before, it was time for the mindless reports and papers that I need to submit for no apparent reason, the damn things took a full day to finish, from writing reports, to formatting the text, to making sure they matched to page count, only for them to end up at a drawer somewhere, because my professor didn't bother reading them that day.

I know what you're thinking, 'why not let chatgpt write it? then take the text and format a PDF with it, easy right?' and you would be right, I even thought about doing that a few times, but after seeing a friend of mine receive an F after they immediately found out his thesis was written by AI, I changed my mind, even if I found a way to make the responses out of chatgpt appear human like, I still needed to find a way to convert it into a PDF, because they obviously wouldn't accept a blank page with the text in the center of the screen.

An idea that's mostly feasible

But then I had an idea, if I were able to find a way for an LLM to be able to directly make the text and inject them into a template that I either had made before hand, and could be customizable, which then renders into a PDF, that I should be able to edit the contents of, to add a human touch to the AI text that's being generated and that's it! I had a ready to use PDF document, that's custom made, beautiful and devoid of the soulless LLM slop that's in every other AI generated text!....but wait, isn't this a lot of work? shouldn't I just make the reports by hand like I had been doing before, without the need for all this work?

If your answer was to just do it by hand, then I have sadly need to inform you that you don't understand the mind of an average software developer, and by extension me, who spent the next three months designing and making the perfect web application that'll hopefully write my reports for me, and as you may have guessed by now, I succeeded!

I built the damn thing from start to end, and while it may not be much for others, its honest work, I worked quite hard on it, and it even generated all the reports and documents for me, which I then edited to make it appear more human, they even got an A in the following semester, which is quite good if I do say so myself.

I had a few ideas I wanted to add, a few things I wanted to test, but as it was time for me to get back to my usual mindless job applying, a friend of mine suggested something.

'Slap a price tag on it and talk about it on the internet, I'm sure that someone out there will pay to use the app, it's like chatgpt but it makes the documents itself, right? I'll pay for it if I had the money'

I honestly hadn't thought of that, I typically make the projects for my personal use, and even then, they rarely leave my graveyard of abandoned personal projects, but as this was truly a finished product, and one that even I would use, given I made it myself, I decided to do as my friend said.

So here we are, I made a web application that generates text for you, renders then to a PDF template of your own design, allows you to edit the text in the entire document, before finally saving them into a cloud storage, just in case you need that same exact document for later.

So if you're interested to hear more about the product, or even want to try it out completely for free, it's already live at genpdf.xyz feel free to give it a try, I'll be happy to know your feedback on it, as it's greatly appreciated.

Please leave your appreciation by commenting on this post!

Okay, let's go.

Top comments (0)

AWS Security LIVE!

Tune in for AWS Security LIVE!

Join AWS Security LIVE! for expert insights and actionable tips to protect your organization and keep security teams prepared.

Learn More