Escape Rope

(For more detail on the below, see DESIGN.md)

What? (Overview)

This is a loose collection of tooling I've been building as a side project to automate my job search habits, built around data I've been gathering through an extended experiment in Web scraping.

Now, it's an experiment in a few different things. the database schema are a first crack at using TypeScript. I'm taking Deno KV (and kvdex) for a spin for data persistence. (And contributed getOne and updateOne to get this to work!) I'm currently toying around with various options for a UI, and starting to evaluate what other tools I might want to build around it, or how I might integrate them.

Here's the UI code, and a demo. Note that this is a first draft.

Why? (Goals and non-goals)

Primarily, it's a tool I've been building for me -- as an experiment, a learning exercise, and a tech demo to show off to anyone that it's aided me in connecting with. Mostly, it's because I believe in building what you want to use.

In this case, the thing I want to use is an exit path -- something of a safety mechanism, in the event that a workplace ever becomes detrimental to my well-being. And also something of a way of pulling myself back up, in the event that one ever throws me into a ditch. Or, say, threatens a "slow climb 🧗" in public settings.

I hope maybe someone else finds it helpful, but its core purpose is to make my life easier. It runs locally first, and isn't heavily focused on features like auth. (At least not for the first draft.) I have a loose "roadmap" of other things that I want to automate, but I'm working on this in stages and trying not to put more effort into building it than I am into using it.

That said, part of removing tedium here is to keep the project as self-contained as possible -- using what comes out of the box first, and then leaning on third-party libraries only where I need them. It's not entirely free of them -- and that's not an explicit goal -- but what is an explicit goal is to keep the toolchain lean enough that I don't have to have opinions about every individual piece of it, and that's best served by using the batteries that are included where that's reasonably an option.

How? (Running this project)

(Note: this section should get more organized as I actually flesh out the application around the data)

Prerequisites

• Deno 2.1 or above

For now, that's it. Other dependencies are pulled in using import maps and HTTP, so you don't need to install any of them up front.

Usage

API

To run the backend: deno run serve

Aside from the UI, you can also declare initial settings using config files in config/campaign. by copying the ones in the examples folder and edit them with your own preferences.

The API supports uploading jobs by making a POST request, sending JSON files as FormData.

A minimal representation of the structure would look like:

{
    "jobs": [
        {
            "title": "Spooky Greeter",
            "company": "Applied Cryogenics"
            // other fields optional
        },
        // more...
    ],
    // that said, this whole thing is optional
    "source": {
        "name": "user upload", // linkedin, etc
        "retrievalDate": "01-01-3000"
        // proper, formatted date here
    }
}

Crawlers

The core scraping workflow is, similiarly, built around Deno's standard task runner -- tasks are defined in deno.jsonc and run using deno run {name}. I'm still reworking the overall design for datasources to be more friendly to extension, but for now there's a base class that contains the core functionality and a rough sample available of how to extend it.

Accordingly, they aren't really covered by the API yet. That said, the tracker runs independently, and you can upload results from other workflows like it.

I've left the one to get "who is hiring" threads from a Hacker News API intact, for example's sake. But it's not going to give you structured responses, and is really just there for the sake of having a task to illustrate this with. (You might find the raw data useful to mine in other ways, but while I periodically toy with using a Llamafile to get detail out of them, forum posts and othr unstructured data aren't an immediate priority.)

Contributing

No thanks. Nothing personal about you, but like I said, this is a personal project for me.

That said, feel free to fork it and, Idk, do what the fuck you want. Speaking of which...

License

This project uses the WTFPL.

Who?

Credits

See DESIGN.md for a list of relevant dependencies.

Dedications

This is for anyone with a horrible boss.