Planning and Developing a Niche Job Board

Planning and Developing a Niche Job Board

It’s been over a year now since i started to professionally focus more and more on the web aspect of software development. And the more time passes, the more i found myself wanting to create something challenging and for myself.

The problem is there is so much stuff to build, but so little time that i was affected by analysis by paralisis. i spent too much time researching and making a decision instead of actually committing to a project.

But you gotta start somewhere. So recently i pulled the trigger and, as i love cool domain names, i purchased the domain cadjobs.com.

Although i am not so familiar with the world of cad. I decided to use this opportunity to learn something, so I created an aggregator of remote jobs focused on cad software (autocad, solidworks and the likes)

link here » Cad Jobs

The interesting thing about job boards is that they can be either really simple as a single page with a call to action to submit your email, or really intricated like an indeed or an upwork. So you can start from a simple page and brick by brick add every desired functionality.

Technologies:

Here’s a few things I’ve learned after a few months of work

Prioritize Your Goals

Your first question should be: what are your goals?

Are You starting a project for the purpose of learning something or for business purposes? Or both?

As time is of the essence, answering this question will save you significant amount of time.

If you are doing this for money then there is no point in using a tech stack you are not comfortable with. You will spend a lot of time just figuring stuff out. Time that will end up wasted if your project will fail. In this case just buy a landing page, a wordpress theme or use the tech stack you are most confortable with and call it a day.

Otherwise, take this opportunity to learn something new.

Spend more time planning and less time coding

It may not be the most enjoyable aspect of the job, but dedicating more time to planning before diving into coding can save significant time and prevent numerous problems in the future.

Coding without prior planning might seem enjoyable initially, but I encountered numerous “oh shit, what about this” moments that necessitated going back to modify existing code. These issues could have been avoided if I had engaged in proper planning beforehand.