DevCred
A Q&A and job-networking platform inspired by Stack Overflow, with recruiter and candidate roles, job boards, notifications, profile analytics, and privacy-aware direct messages.
Over a full semester, I worked in a team of three to build DevCred, a Q&A platform inspired by Stack Overflow, extended with recruiting and job-networking features.
Beyond a clone
The features that were added were:
- Role-based accounts for recruiters and candidates, with job boards and job fairs.
- Profile analytics, notifications, resume upload, and job-application history.
- Revised direct messaging system.
- A reworked interface across the whole product.
Features/revisions I made
- DM deletion
- DM backend revamped to avoid storing duplicate messages
- Job fairs with interactions such as chat rooms and coding tournaments
- Piloted the notification feature where team members finalized it to work with the rest of the application.
Bilateral DM deletion
I implemented bilateral direct message deletion. By making this design choice, a message is permanently removed from the database only when both parties delete it. If one person deletes a DM channel but the other keeps it and later sends a new message, the deleter regains access. Getting that state machine to work as intended required a schema overhaul and edge-cases to be handled.
Challenges
Cypress UI tests were challenging to write since there were complex features such as PDF uploads. Frontend and backend integration with OpenAPI validation frequently mismatched and caused test failures. These were solved by writing more specific test suites to test parts of the larger feature and having multiple people audit the schemas.
Quality assurance
I wrote unit and integration tests with Jest covering backend routes and updated schemas, to catch feature regressions as three people moved fast in delivering the proposed features.
