Skills Application

I have been working on this application for a few weeks now, and I am finally ready to release version 1.0 of it.  The site, Skills Compiler , (I suck at naming) was inspired by a few things, but these in particular. I wanted to teach myself a new language, I wanted to do some more general web development, and finally I was inspired a bit by the Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career.  If you haven't read the book, I definitely recommend it.  In the book, one of the points it makes is keeping up with latest trends making sure your skills are up to date, and it kind of inspired me to think about ways of finding the trends in the development community, which is something I personally wanted to improve on.  

All of this combined with my curiosity started me down the path of creating this app.  The app displays data that I have scraped from the Careers 2.0  in a few different ways.  The app displays the totals per day, as well as the overall totals for a given tag.  A tag is counted when it is listed for a given position.  For example, this position by Sonoma Partners for a Salesforce Developer would add 1 to the daily count for Java, visualforce, apex-code, soql, and JavaScript for each day the job is listed.  

Obviously this is just a small snapshot of the jobs that are out there because it currently only looks at one site, however there are still some interesting things that you can gather from a month and a half worth of data.


1. Web development is very much in.

As if this was a surprise, web development is very high in the totals.  JavaScript, css, html, jQuery, and html5 are all in the top 15 skills, which makes since since these are the languages of the web (and possible mobile) development regardless of what you use for the backend.  

2. Compiled languages are still in.

Traditional c syntax languages such as Java (2), C# (3), and C++(9) are still in high demand.  These skills are still in high demand.

3. Ruby-on-Rails is in more demand than ruby.

I thought this was weird, but others don't seem to think so.  I would imagine if you are posting a job for ruby-on-rails that you would also tag your job for ruby.  This is not the case.  After creating the site, I can see why.  I'm pretty sure found myself googling for more Rails specific questions and less for Ruby questions.  Ruby and Rails is the only one that I noticed listed like this.  For every other framework including Node, Django, ASP, ASP.MVC, Spring, etc., the language is listed more often then the framework.  

4. Android and ios development are pretty close.

Although ios is listed a bit more, they are both listed over 3.5k times.  Interestingly enough though, android was one of the few skills where you can definitely see a trend.  It peaked at 118 postings back on the 5th of Feb, but has sank down to 85 postings today. Generic mobile has been listed 2439 times.

5. SQL is king, but Mongo is steady.

SQL and more specifically mysql are both in the top 10.  Mongo is 30th which is still pretty high.

6. Angular.js is the top MV*/ Templating JS framework

Although jQuery is still the king as far as JS frameworks go, angular is listed over 2500 times.  Backbone isn't far behind at 1881.  After that there is a drop off with the next framework, ember, being listed 460 times.  

7. Amazon-web-services are in high demand

This could be because amazon posts their jobs on the site, but regardless amazon-web-services are listed over 2k times on the site.  Learning how to use these could be a useful niche skill.  


8. People are people.

I probably shouldn't be surprised that people don't proofread their postings, but it happens.  There are a lot of jobs with 1 day postings or with one posting over multiple days like this one looking for "telerick".


I have talked to a few people about the app while I had been working on it and I had received some good feedback. Some other people had some thoughts like seeing if certain jobs were regional (break down by city/state), or ubiquitous, or seeing which tags were related together.  I personally want to add some more filter and search criteria as well as redactor some of the code a bit.  I also have to figure out how to automate the importation of data to the site.  As of right now it is a manual process.  Finally, I might need to look at how I am storing the data in general because I am way over the limit for the free trial of Heroku and will most likely be forking over some $ to keep it going.  

Regardless I would love to get any feedback anyone has.  Hope you enjoy it!