Engineering on Shorendipity | Ahmed Shodipo

Building GradGlance (4/4): Application Logging & Analytics

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 00:20:43 +0000

The previous article focused on Application Deployment and Hosting, taking the user behind the scenes of the technologies that power GradGlance

This article, the last of the series, will focus on GradGlance Application Logging & Analytics.

Transitioning from active development to operations mode came with a mix of feelings. First was pride. Pride in the work that had been done to get to this point. Pride in the hours of hard work and care that enabled the service to brave the realities of serverland and deliver value to users around the world. Right next to the feeling of pride was that of anxiety because of the many ways things could break.

Building GradGlance (3/4): Application Deployment & Hosting

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 00:15:06 +0000

The previous article focused on GradGlance Systems and Interface Design, helping the reader appreciate some of the engineering and design decisions I made while building the service.

This article will discuss GradGlance Application Deployment & Hosting

Introduction

I enjoyed writing this one. Not because I had more things to say; or because my favourite piano playlist was on repeat as I stitched this article together; but because writing made me reflect on how much I dreaded deployments before building GradGlance and how so much has changed since. To have come to the point where I can now articulate how I made it all happen, on a server I own, having overcome my fears one Linux concept at a time, fills me with an understandable sense of accomplishment - a serious testament to how far I have come indeed.

Building GradGlance (2/4): Application Design & Development

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 20:02:23 +0000

The previous article provided context on the UK graduate job market and discussed my motivation for building GradGlance.

This article will be more technical as it will focus on GradGlance Application Design and Development.

Systems Design

GradGlance is a full-stack application built with React(TypeScript) on the client-side and Python(FastAPI) on the backend. The application leverages Selenium for web-scraping and MongoDB as its database solution. GradGlance runs from a Linux server and uses Cron to schedule daily data fetching and scraping jobs.

Building GradGlance (1/4): Introduction & Motivation

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 04:10:27 +0100

Introduction

Put simply, graduate job hunting in the UK is an extreme sport. Around September every year, companies in the UK open their portals to new talent, flooding the market with job opportunities for recent graduates. The driven student understands that job applications are squarely a numbers game. And so they take as many shots as they possibly can.

But taking many shots involves a lot of things. First, the student must subscribe to several job boards to discover opportunities the moment they drop as delay can be dangerous. Companies have been known to close their portals, long before the official closing date, once they fill their quota of applicants. Second, the student must then go through the actual application which kickstarts a multi-stage process that, depending on the company, can involve situational judgement tests, numerical tests, on-demand video interviews, rounds of technical interviews and assessment centers.