Dev blog
What shipped, and the problem it solves
One post every Friday. Each one starts with a problem a job seeker actually has, explains how it was built, and ends with the release notes for that week.
Who is writing this
I’m Aaron. I spent ten years as a consultant, which meant the job search never actually stopped — every engagement had an end date, and the next one had to be found while the current one was still running. I have worked at Amazon, Expedia, T-Mobile, AT&T and Microsoft. Over those years I built a process for it: a way to track every application, tailor a resume to a specific posting without inventing anything, and know which threads were going cold. I did it by hand, in spreadsheets and documents, for a decade.
Job Umbrella is that process, automated. I started building it in July 2026 after reading one too many posts from people who had applied to several hundred jobs — some of them a thousand — before getting an offer they could accept. The same complaints came up every time: listings that were never really open, matches that had nothing to do with the person, and applications that vanished without a reply.
One more thing pushed me into building it. A lot of sites will happily rewrite your resume for a specific job. Not one of them looks at your resume first to see whether it is any good. That is garbage in, garbage out with a subscription attached. A tool that rewrites a weak resume gives you a weak resume in a new font.
The one promise this site is built on
Nobody can pay to get to the top of your list. Paid job promotion is the obvious way to make money here, and it is the reason every big job board ranks the way it does. It also puts the site on both sides of the market at once: serving the person looking for work, and serving the employer paying to be seen. Those two interests are not the same, and when they conflict, the money decides.
I have chosen to remove the conflict by refusing the revenue. It was specified, costed, and then killed in September 2026 for exactly this reason. What pays for the site instead is written up in How a free job site pays for itself without selling you.
Posts
- September 25, 2026MatchingThe reason you are lookingFour people can search the same job titles and want entirely different jobs. This week the ranking started asking why — a step up, a change of field, a return after time out — and the pay you asked for became something a listing is judged against.
- September 18, 2026ResumesThe model only sees what we choseEvery site will rewrite your resume for a job. None of them tells you whether the resume is any good first, and none of them can stop the model inventing the rest. Release 3.
- September 11, 2026MatchingThe job was never openSomewhere between one in seven and one in three listings is dead. Here is how to measure that from data a job board already gives you, and what it costs to get it wrong.
- September 4, 2026ProductThe first five minutesA new account opened on an empty board and a twelve-field form. Four reviewers looked at the product independently and all four ranked the same thing first.
- August 28, 2026Quiet weekOne commit this weekProfile-driven job matching landed as a single commit. It does not work, I do not yet know why, and nothing reached production. A short post about a stuck week.
- August 21, 2026MoneyHow a free job site pays for itself without selling youPaid job promotion is the obvious revenue. It is also a conflict of interest between the job seeker and the employer paying. I am refusing that money, and this is the arithmetic.
- August 14, 2026ResumesGarbage in, garbage outA dozen sites will tailor your resume to a posting. Not one of them checks whether your resume was any good before it starts. That is the wrong order.
- August 7, 2026Quiet weekA quiet week, and the bug that ate a jobSix commits. One of them fixed a resume generator that could silently drop an entire role from someone's work history.
- July 31, 2026TrustYour data, and the door outResume sites are accused of reselling what you upload. The answer is not a promise in a privacy policy. It is a delete button that works, and an export that arrives first.
- July 24, 2026ResumesTailoring a resume is easy. Not lying is the hard partAsk a model to make a resume fit a job and it will, by adding things you never did. The first week after launch was mostly about stopping that.
- July 17, 2026LaunchWhy I built a job search site instead of using oneTen years of consulting meant ten years of never stopping the job search. I built the process by hand, over and over. This is the week I stopped doing it by hand.
Two things about this blog
The early posts are backdated. The blog itself started in September 2026. The posts before that date were written from the project’s own release ledger and its commit history, and each one is dated to the Friday of the week it describes. Every commit hash, count and date in them is real and checkable. Nothing here claims to have been published at the time.
The code is written by AI agents, directed by me. I design the work, decide what ships, and run every change through a review pass where other agents are told to break it rather than approve it. That process finds real defects — one week in September it produced about a hundred findings before anything merged, and three separate security fixes were beaten by the reviewer set on them and had to be rebuilt. Where that method shaped a release, the post says so.