work-at-microsoft

wilsonl.in/msft

An at-edge web service + app for finding careers at Microsoft, built as a demo for Edgesearch.

Faster and more precise than the official website, and comes with a nice UI.

Improvements

This app allows the combining of simple filters to form advanced, precise queries. Combined with the performance optimisations of Edgesearch, it delivers more filtered results in usually under a second.

For a UI comparison, see the screenshots folder.

Technical

Data

All jobs available on careers.microsoft.com are fetched and processed into an array of JSON objects. Each object represents a job, with fields describing some aspect of the job:

{
  "ID": "19234",
  "title": "Azure Service Engineer",
  "description": "Hello world",
  "date": "2018-1-3",
  "location": "Redmond, Washington, United States"
}

The title, location, and description fields are searchable.

Code

Backend

The worker code is built using Edgesearch. See the project for more details. To build and deploy the worker or test it locally, see the worker scripts.

Building the worker requires at least clang 8 and lld 8. The build scripts use a release build of Edgesearch from this repository, so build Edgesearch using cargo build --release before running them.

Frontend

All the app files are located in client:

• page.hbs: main HTML file, written as a Handlebars template to remove repetition and allow conditional content
• script.js: custom JS that contains logic for autocomplete, animations, searching, and general UX
• style.css: styling for the app
• various external libraries and styles
• assets/*: files relating to app metadata, such as favicon.ico

All files except for assets/* are minified and bundled together into one HTML file to reduce the file size and amount of round trips required for the end user. The client is built using client/build.ts, which should be run directly using ts-node.

Data

Data fetching and processing is done by data/build.ts. Install the npm dependencies and run the script directly using ts-node.