Show HN: I built a PHP remote job aggregator to find work | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a PHP remote job aggregator to find work

php-jobs.net

1 pointPaleontologist4 comments

Been job hunting for months now and got tired of checking 10+ job boards every day just to find the same recycled "remote (but actually not)" positions.

So I built https://php-jobs.net

It's basically a scraper that pulls PHP jobs from multiple sources and tries to filter out the BS. Nothing revolutionary, but it saves me hours of daily searching.

The setup:

- Main site runs on a purchased CMS I'm hacking on (not proud of it but it works)

- Wrote custom parsers as a separate service using Swow - the coroutines make scraping way faster than my first attempt with regular curl / guzzle

- Queue workers running in Docker handle the updates

- Laravel/Beanstalkd keeping everything organized

Right now pulling in around 1k jobs - Laravel, Symfony, WordPress, the usual PHP stuff.

Fair warning: it's rough around the edges. Sometimes parsers break, sometimes duplicates slip through. Working on it between sending out resumes.

Would appreciate any feedback, especially:

- Know any good PHP job sources?

- Notice anything broken?

- Ideas for better filtering?

Building this while unemployed is... interesting. Part therapy, part desperation, part hoping it actually helps land something. If you're in the same boat, hopefully it saves you some time too.

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"Back in the day" I crawled Craigslist to get the urls for every location served in north America. Craigslist allowed you to create an rss feed from a search, so I scripted rss links to every location's jobs section with the search "freelance telecommute lamp developer".

Looking through that every day, got many contract jobs and 2 full time 10+ year "careers".

Low tech, but when it got to the sales calls was able to push the "creative problem solver" and "time/cost aware" angles, in addition to my tech resume. There was literally hardly any competition in many of these markets, because everyone else was on monster or whatever. Ymmv

love this. going where others aren't looking is the key

actually working on something similar - tracking fresh funding rounds and then scraping those companies' career pages. they hire fast after raising, I'm sure.

tricky part is identifying which ones actually use PHP without burning time on every startup. your CL+RSS approach was way cleaner

might just add craigslist to the scrapers, bet there's still gold there

Technical solution to a non-technical problem, my man.

More effective to do whatever you can to jump ahead of the application horde. Literally have to fall back to ordinary sales & marketing techniques almost.

fair point. though my rule is: if you're doing something manually more than twice, automate it

now i can spend more time on the actual networking instead of clicking through the same sites every morning

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