Build in public: Beginneritjobs
aka what does the ”We do not recommend using it in production yet” mean
Hi everyone 👋
Building on beta software, moving fast, breaking things. 🦖💥🌋
What could go wrong?
Well, if you try to ship an MVP and you give yourself a constraint like:
Do it in 7 days.
Everything.
What you’ll get out of this issue:
Why build a job board?
Why make a job board for beginners?
Next.js 13, is it any good?
Building in public experience
Why build a job board
On March 31, 2022, StackOverflow Jobs, one of the most known job boards, was shut down.
With it, the job advertisement industry was looking for alternative solutions.
Are you saying, in 2022 we don’t have an alternative for this?
Yup! You’ll realize this as soon as you try to find one!
Now you would think, come on, this is the IT/Software job market. Someone must be doing this already. Microsoft? Facebook?
Wrong! Or at least, there isn’t a superiority like StackOverflow has for QA sites.
In fact, there are so many different job sites that Rodrigo even builds a job board for job boards:
Why build a job board for beginners?
My friend was looking for her first job in IT.
I suggested jobboardsearch.com as a good starting point.
Then a few days later, I decided to look at some of these job boards, and you wouldn’t guess what I found.
I found lots of crappy job boards, and the bad ones fell into one of these categories:
Job boards that don’t link to the original job but to another job board. I can imagine some of these job boards scraping each other for jobs. This might get you hundreds of jobs, but it’s a bad experience for someone looking for a job.
Some job descriptions are questionable at best. I found ”Junior” jobs that required a BSc and 3+ years of experience in a programming language.
All in all, for a beginner looking for that first job in IT, this can be frustrating.
So I decided to build a job board where I hand-picked Junior jobs.
Real Junior Jobs.
I was shocked when I learned that the beginneritjobs.com domain wasn’t taken.
It started getting organic traffic from day one without me telling anyone about this domain.
This gave me the final confirmation I needed, and I felt I had to build this thing.
Next.js 13, is it any good?
I started working on beginneritjobs on November 2.
I’ve been keeping a close eye on Next.js even though I never used it for any production projects before.
Next.js 13 was an incredible release for me because:
React Server Components
Async Data fetching and
Turbopack
I couldn’t wait to build something with it, and I already had a great domain, so 🤷♂️
The development went smoothly, and I used their scaffolding tool to generate a TypeScript project.
Because I was feeling adventurous, I also added the experimental app dir flag to it:
npx create-next-app@latest beginneritjobs --ts --experimental-app
The appDir feature is a fundamental change in Next.js routing. You can read more about this feature here.
I wanted to use appDir
at all costs because you can write React Server Components there.
In short, with React Server Components, the client-server boundaries disappear.
On one line, you’re doing a database query.
On the next, you’re rendering the result set into a table.
It’s like PHP or Ruby.
What I should have taken seriously for this project that I wanted to launch in “just a few days” was this:
Don’t build on experimental stuff if you’d like to launch soon.
There was a bug before v13.0.4 that sometimes forced the browser to download a file instead of opening a web page.
Of course, you can’t go with something like this in public, so I wasted three days looking for a solution and then waiting for a fix.
Building in public experience
I haven’t tweeted as much about this as I tweeted about Tweton.
The plan was to turn this into a functional website in a few days, then launch & keep building.
Unfortunately, I wasted the most time on something that was a bug in Next.js.
Lesson learned.
I have a complete understanding and practical experience of what
We do not recommend using it in production yet
means.
Please let me know if any of this was helpful to you.
You can always reply to these emails, and I’ll answer too!
Thank you for reading.
- Akos