Arcade Jobs

Level up your career.

Comment

Inspiration

Tracking job applications is annoying. Even letting go of the doom of the CS job market, it's always that one tiny thing of tracking a new application that feels like so much effort. That's where Arcade comes in.

What it does

We give you an email address. [username]@me.arcadejobs.co.

Whenever you apply to a new job, in place of your typical personal, go ahead and throw this one in instead. Don't worry, it'll get forwarded to the email you check most often, but each email that passes through this special address will get parsed out into a dashboard, so the tracking becomes COMPLETELY automatic.

The dashboard (currently) has two main functionalities

  • Contribution Graph: Just like in GitHub, you can see how many applications you've been submitting per day. Rather than only flooding your inbox, squares glow brighter.
  • Recent Applications: A spot to view all of your recent correspondence, with only the fields that matter: Company Name, Position Title, Application Status

Use it, check it when you remember.

How we built it

This is almost entirely an AWS stack. Built with SES, S3, Lambda, Comprehend, DynamoDB, plus a few extra. Additionally, auth is handled by Clerk and stored in Dynamo for account creation, while the app itself is a Next.js app.

Challenges we ran into

This was my first time diving into AWS, and I definitely took a bit of a plunge here. Writing the Lambda functions took an extremely lengthy period of time.

Training the Comprehend model was an unexpected challenge, but one we eventually overcame (although I didn't realize money was involved).

Otherwise, wrapping my head around the whole flow itself. But I learned.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

IT WORKS. I'm really proud of the entire cloud flow, and while it could be optimized in a couple ways, I am very happy with the result.

What we learned

A lot of the ins and outs of AWS.

What's next for Arcade?

  • Prettier Email Forwarding
  • Better FE styling
  • Better email parsing -- likely a switch away from Comprehend or more datasets.
  • More features with the data -- sort by company name, built in search, etc. This is a product I'm extremely passionate about.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates