Rysumy
Motivation
Companies spend a significant amount of resources on recruitment, but as a candidate, there aren't really good tools to track applications with companies. Rysumy provides analytics for your resume so you'll know if anyone at least opened your resume.
Internship Applications
When applying for internships, Waterloo strongly encourages students to use the WaterlooWorks portal, which is nothing less than a miserable user experience. In addition, because the application period is so short, students often don't have the time to really tailor their applications to companies. In response to this, I built an automated tool that will go through my shortlist and automatically prepare a resume and submit it.
A lot of my friends were interested in what I'd done, and wanted to use it for themselves. When I first built it, it was tightly coupled with my own resume, and due to the tight window we have for applying, I wasn't able to share it with anyone. However, I felt like it could be a useful tool for other people, so I earmarked it as a potential project.
Covid-19
After working on Amitue for the first two and a half months of my eco-op, and when the situation with COVID-19 made it clear that we were heading towards lockdown, I pivoted towards building Rysumy from my initial tool. In the month and a half I had left, I was able to bring rysumy to an alpha state. Although it is still heavily focused on software-style resumes, I think it is perfectly usable, and in fact used it for my applications for my final co-op.
Current Thoughts & Learnings
Rysumy was a fantastic opportunity to focus on execution. I already had the core of the code (though I ended up rewriting it all because it was too tightly coupled originally) as well as a lot of infrastructure and ops knowledge from Amitue, so I could focus on getting something out as soon as possible.
Naturally, there is still a lot of work that I want to do and features that I want to add, so I absolutely plan on coming back to it. One aspect that makes rysumy particularly interesting for me is that I'm personally using it in a "production" environment - my co-op/full-time job searching. This introduces a few unique challenges (like ensuring I never end up in a broken state, or that I can at minimum recover from such a state) that I think are really fun.
