whoshiring

Welcome to "whoshiring", a browser for Hacker News's monthly Ask HN: Who's Hiring pages.

Implementation

Whoshiring is built atop the Matrix mxWeb™ web application un-framework -- just a thin, pass-through wrapper for HTML, CSS, JS, and AJAX. Here is the Live version.

Running it yourself

Easy.

git clone https://github.com/kennytilton/whoshiring.git

Now open whoshiring/index-es6.html in FireFox. Other browsers reject pulling HN pages from a local directory into an iframe for scraping. Ideas on generalizing to other browsers for development are welcome.

You can now play with the source*, save, and refresh the page back in the browser. That is how I work, FWIW. I am also have on a CLJS/re-frame version where figwheel will hot load changes.

* No, you cannot (play with the source)

mxWeb is simple, but only after we have grokked the data flow library Matrix™ on which it is built. Matrix is like MobX, but goes a bit further. We find the Binding.scala data flow library impressive as well.

Matrix is largely undocumented**, though there are an extensive number of sample apps, including this one, TodoMVC, The Flux Challenge, and a simulator of Ivan Sutherland's Micropipelines.

All that said, a few exceptional users have picked up mxWeb after zero to three emails, so it is doable.

Staying current

The app works by scraping saved HN page sources. The files directory has a subdirectory for each HN message ID in which they ask Who's Hiring. That subirectory has multiple HTML files retrieved with the additional query parameter p=<n> where <n> is 1 to however many pages of answers (job listings) they have. They do about 200 jobs per page, and recently had about 870 jobs all told. Anyway...

To refresh your page data:

cd whoshiring
./grab

More soon.

Going minimal

To compile the JS into a single file, use the epinymous bash script at the toplevel of the directory:

cd whoshiring
./whoshiring

Now open index.html, again in FireFox.

** Undocumented, but not unexplained

My latest attempt to explain mxWeb is a wonderfully elaborate CodePen application within an application, both built from mxWeb. The larger app presents the incremental evolution of about half of TodoMVC and a bit more, using mxXHR™ to check items for adverse events on an NIH web site.

It is a solid write-up, but the point emphasized was the transparency of the data flow mechanism, and transparency is hard to see. What might help is a recent write-up of how we stumbled onto data flow, including how we made it transparent.

More help

Shoot me an e-mail or raise a GitHub issue and I will help.