First month building typescriptjobs.io

2023-02-13

typescriptjobs

buildinpublic

indiehacker

TLDR:

I got Next.js, Supabase, Material UI, Plausible, and MailerLite to all play nicely together. Typescriptjobs.io pulls data from remoteok.com's and jsjobbs.com's JSON APIs. The data is displayed in a big list on the homepage and single job pages when you click through.

From what I could find, most folks building job boards are doing web scraping of public data, finding rss feeds, or finding APIs to pull the initial job posts from. I did not want to do web scraping to start with, as that would take more development time.
RSS feeds seem like a good option, but the ones I found did not have all the data in the initial request. I'd need to follow every job post link to search the description. Again, maybe later, but not for now.
Then the search for APIs. I started with remoteok.com's API. That site was kind of the inspiration for typescriptjobs.io anyway and I really like the way that Petier Levels is doing things.
Pretty simple, call the API endpoint, search all the job descriptions for "typescript", add it to a local Supabase instance. BOOM, I have typescript jobs!

I knew I was going to use Next.js from the beginning. I've used it a bunch and I really like it. I wanted to use a component library or a css framework to help with the styling, basically I wanted some sensible defaults so I could implement quickly.
New project syndrome set in. I started looking at all the options: Chakra UI, MUI, Tailwind, Theme UI, probably some more.... I reeeeeeaaallly want to like Tailwind, I've heard so much good stuff about it from folks online.
But I chose Material UI. I've used it before. I know how it works. It's a component library. It has theming built in.
And Tailwind is not those things. My goal was to implement things quickly, not learn a new (to me) CSS framework.

Now to make all the things play nice together in a live environment.
The first step, get my local Supabase migrations on a Supabase instance. Supabase makes this really easy with their CLI tool.... and even easier if you read the documentation....
I did have issues using supabase link . Turns out when you pass the --project-ref argument, it does indeed mean project ref and not project name. I will forever remember this goofy mistake of mine 😅
Next up, getting the code deployed to Vercel. Luckily, this site was already deployed to Vercel and the github integration already installed.
The only thing to do was to go in and give the Vercel app permission to see the typescriptjobs repo. After making the project in Vercel.
Then I added the Supabase and Plausible env vars to the Vercel project.
Once that was done, I made a commit, pushed to github, and the code base auto-magically deployed to Vercel!
I did need to go into Plausible and set up a new site. Then made sure everything was reporting correctly.
Then all the DNS stuff. I changed the nameservers to the Vercel ones, instead of Namecheap. Still not sure this is the right path, but here we are.

Some small incremental updates here.
- Updated slug creation with some regex I found
- added pagination to the home page and ordered the jobs by the created_at date
- nested single jobs under /jobs
- found out that the remote ok jobs API updated.... and broke the integration... So spent some time fixing that.

Someone signed up to the typescriptjobs.io newsletter!
The initial set up was a simple text input and a button that put the text into a table in Supabase. Simple and I was able to capture emails, but was unsure on how I was going to send them.
So down the rabbit hole I went. I looked at/signed up for substack, convertkit, mailchimp, constant contact, tiny letter and mailer lite.
My goals for the email integration are an easy API to integrate with and the ability to send emails to people. I did NOT want a full blown Marketing Automation Website Builder Customer Tracking System.
I dug into Mailchimp and it is more than I need for now. It does too much and I did not want to sort through what I needed and did not need. Actually, the biggest deal breaker was not being able to "delete" a subscriber. I wanted to test the sign up flow with the same email, but I couldn't figure out a way to sign up with an email, go through the confirmation flow, remove that email in the Mailchimp ui and repeat. 🤷🏼
Tiny Letter looks really promising! It's really simple but the API is not documented.
Finally I landed on MailerLite. Functionality wise, it's somewhere between Tiny Letter and Mailchimp. (maybe better to think of that as how much stuff there is in the ui)

Reach out to me on Twitter @readingwaters