So, I "did a thing", and I am "doing a thing" again...

Some not-so-brief history...

One of the things I have written over the past couple of years has been my job application tracker. If you have ever had the misfortune of being unemployed, a situation with which far too many software developers and software engineers are familiar, you know your state requires keeping track of where you apply to each week, and be able to supply that information upon demand, if they don't already require you to submit it with your weekly filing. Traditionally, I have either entered this into a plain text file, or in recent years, a spreadsheet, often up on Google. And when I was laid off from Monkey Knife Fight (yes, that really was the company name) when Bally Interactive shut us down, this is what I started doing. A typical spreadsheet, with a frozen header row, and columns for the date, a 1/0 column for tracking if it was still active (e.g. I had not gotten the usual "we decided not to move forward" email), a column for notes, one for the company name, and one to try to link to the email confirmation I would get when applying. And after a couple of weeks, I quickly added a column for saving the link to the specific job posting, and as things dragged out, later the position title. Those last two things I found to be helpful for when I was applying to a second or subsequent position at the same company.. But the spreadsheet grew more and more tedious to deal with. While you can type Ctrl-F to find a company by its name, that takes you away from the bottom of the spreadsheet, you have to continue to search for the later occurrences, and then you finally have to skip to the last row of the spreadsheet. Then there are the tricks you have to learn, such as Ctrl-Shift-V to paste text without formatting, or as I just learned out of curiosity for scrolling to the last row, Ctrl-DownArrow to go to where you want to enter the next record. All in all, it was about as pleasant as having a burr stuck inside the back of your shirt, and not being able to take the shirt off. So I did what any developer/engineer does... I customized things by writing a simple little program.

What I created initially was far from ideal, but I was after quick and dirty... and got very quick and very dirty. I had a custom django-admin command command to read the Google spreadsheet to load it into the database. Then, I was rendering the page with the list of job applications with all the data from the database in the table which used DataTables to look pretty. And while it had an Edit/View functionality, the form it displayed was very crude to say the least. But to add records, I had to use the Django Admin interfaces. I even had to run the browser on the development VM rather than on my laptop which I use to connect to the world. Then there was the fact that all the JavaScript/CSS packages which I was using were committed to the repository. That was Version 0.1 if you will. I did not even think to add a version to it, I just wanted something better than the spreadsheet.

Details about version 0.1, including design decisions and screenshots

Since I wanted something to show off my Python skills, I used Django backed up with a PostgreSQL database. Why PostgreSQL and not one MySQL or its MariaDB fork? While MySQL does have its Community Edition and is free, when Oracle acquired Sun, I got slightly turned off on it, and started using MariaDB. And both do have a few features I like, such as GROUP_CONCAT() or the ability to alter a table to add or move a column before or after another, I fell in love with PostgreSQL some years ago for some of its additional complex data types and other features. And while I have both a MariaDB and PostgreSQL server (multiple, actually) running in my network, I tend to favor the latter. Indeed, for Heimdallr, where several tasks such as storing the logs from my firewall and web servers it is a very write-heavy task, the performance of PostgreSQL and the availability of native data types for network addresses became critical. And at first, it really was a simple, little program. I started off coding the initial program over the course of a couple off days, complete with jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery UI theming. It also used DataTables to display the data in a paginated form, and with the ability to search for companies, and had a basic navigation bar at the top of the page. And as I have already noted, it even included a custom django-admin command to run from the command line to import my original Google Spreadsheet. All I had to do was to was to run the command python manage.py applications:importsheet. The application list page looked like this:

Version 0.1 had some drawbacks, some of which I have already mentioned. The biggest one is that if you look at the screen, you will notice that there is no apparent way to add new entries. You could view or edit an existing entry, but to add an entry, I started off using the admin interface. And then, there was the fact that to have jQuery and all those other JavaScript/CSS assets, I literally downloaded them, unpacked them into the static directory, and committed them into git. And lastly, I rendered the entire dataset as an HTML table before turning things over to DataTables. Even the page to view an individual entry was crude, looking like this:

I didn't mess with things much over the holidays, but once the first of the year hit, I was starting to deal with entering more applications. After a half dozen times of having to enter new records through the admin interface, and having to use a browser running on the development VM, which can be sluggish at times, I once again opened the IDE to start coding.

Version 1.0, with screenshots

I quickly beefed up the use of the .env file for more than just the database credentials and Google API information. I then threw in a commit to rid myself of all that static content from the JavaScript libraries, and started using npm (Why not use a CDN? Because at times, CDNs go down.) to download my dependencies, just like I use requirements.txt for the Python packages. Then, I played a bit with django-ajax-datatables and a couple of alternatives, but quickly settled upon it along with django rest framework to allow for loading the DataTables using AJAX complete with state saving and expandable row details, a working Add button, and had a CI/CD process working so that it could be built and pushed to a local Docker registry and deployed from there, with the .env file stored in Jenkins and checked out into the Jenkins build directory for inclusion into the image. This is what was version 1.0, and it looked like this:

And the add/edit page looking like this:

And so things sat for over a year, with a copy running on my internal docker server. And lots of applications were entered over that time. No more having to remember to do Ctrl-Alt-V when copying and pasting from a job post on LinkedIn or similar sites, no having to go into the Django admin interface to add entries, and no having to run the browser locally.

Version 1.1, with webpack bundles, an about page and more...

After a year, first I started getting tired of expanding the details to get the clickable link to the job posting, and I made the Job Title clickable to take you to the job posting. Then, I got the idea to add a copy of this application and Heimdallr running in my DMZ to add to my Demo page. One of the first things I did was upgraded my Docker installation to Swarms, which allow for storing secrets and injecting them into containers. I then fixed an issue with tagging the image, and added the About page to show the build information, with a link to the page grouped with the other nav menu items. And then I fixed an issue with the timezones on the When field... until now, if I were entering applications after midnight GMT, I had to tweak the date in that field. A minor issue, but important if I were to show it off. Next, I changed the Active column from true/false to Yes/No. A few weeks later, I picked things back up, and started really using Webpack to bundle all my JavaScript, CSS and images. And finally, I added a new field for storing the date I get the "We have decided to not move forward" email, adding a created_at and updated_at field at the same time. This is version 1.1, which looks mostly like version 1.0, with the exception of the About page and the added field. And, I have the Jenkinsfile deploying new copies of the application to both my internal server and into my DMZ for a demo site, with the latter pointing to a database which contains a subset of the data. All that over the course of about two weeks off and on. And we had version 1.1.

Where we are today, with me "doing a thing"...

As it exists in both my internal production and external demo sites, there is no authentication on entering/editing the data. Since the only data which matters is that which is accessed by my internal site, and the demo site is regularly refreshed from that, it was not a "huge deal", and was just a matter of convenience. But, for a real application, this would be done behind a login, and the records would have a user ID associated with them. So, the first step was to add a really crude login page. I actually have that working now, but it needs major styling work. Right now, I am going through the Django Admin pages, looking at their Light/Dark theming, how they do their styling, and more. As a result, I adjusted my Webpack configuration and moved my static assets to follow the same pattern that the packages do. And I am totally reworking the theming, as well as the master page template as a result. And once that is done, I will work on the controllers to use the logged in user ID in the database and controllers. And once that is done, I will tweak the database cloning script to modify my login record to remove things like admin privileges, reset the password, and make the account accessible to folks viewing the site. Add a change to the homepage to tell folks to "log in" as me, with the demo password, and I will have something really nice to show off.

In the meantime, bed, since it is now almost 2:30 in the morning...

So, I "did a thing", and I am "doing a thing" again...

Some not-so-brief history...

Where we are today, with me "doing a thing"...

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