Building a job board and running it for FREE (🚨Warning : Very Hacky)

A job board to solve my own problem

As someone who has worked in multiple countries and still fond of it, I really wanted to find job board for a niche - visa sponsored jobs for software engineers.

Yeah that's cool, but from where do I get job posts 🤔

Job boards have a chicken and egg problem. You need traffic to bring in the job posts and job posts to bring in the traffic. So I decided to scrap some jobs from Stackoverflow job posts and eventually when I get ample job post of my own I can move on from it.

And so I began writing a web-scrapper

I Started building a web scraper using Python and Django Rest Framework. It scrapped all the jobs and gave me back in a nicely formatted JSON format. Then I build the Job board UI in ReactJs. All very simple enough architecture, React fetches the list of jobs from Django RESTful backend.

Time for deployment (now here's the twist)

Front end hosting is a seamless process these day. Numerous free options like Netlify, Render and Vercel. 🤔 But Backend hosting isn't free anywhere and it made me think should I really be paying for project which has no traffic and making no money. I mean I already have plenty of non monetized projects in my Github "Museum".

I Finally took the El-Cheapo way

I realized that there's no need to add new job everyday, I can simply to it every 5 days by just making my django project locally (on my machine) scrap all jobs and then I just dump it in a json file on the front-end manually.

Lesson Learnt

🤖 Automation is cool, but at times the cost of automation is more than good'ole manual ways. My site is now live and running free of cost. you can check it out here and I have also open sourced the front-end code.