One commit this week

One commit this week. It is a big one — profile-driven job matching, the feature the whole site is pointed at — and as I write this, it does not work.

What it is supposed to do

Everything so far has been reactive: you find a posting, you bring it here, the site helps you apply well. Matching turns that around. Your profile describes what you can do and what you want. A pass runs against the job feed, scores every listing against that profile in plain code, and keeps the ones worth your attention.

There is no AI in the scoring, deliberately. It is title-word overlap, skill hits, location and remote handling, and a decay for how old the posting is. Two reasons. The marginal cost of a matching pass is then zero, which matters for something that has to run for every user on a schedule. And it sets a baseline: when I do add model-based ranking later, it has to prove it beats arithmetic I can read.

And what it does instead

It shows “Could not load matches”. That is my error message, from my code, and it is useless. It tells me the request failed. It does not tell me the request failed because the database refused it.

Four days into this, I still have not read the runtime log. I have been reading my own code, which is the wrong end of the problem.

I am writing this on Friday with the bug still open, because the honest version of a development blog includes the weeks where you are stuck. What I know so far: the failure is specific to this one table. Other tables added at the same time work fine, which rules out the explanation I spent two days assuming — that something general about new tables was wrong. It is not a migration problem either. The table exists and the migrations are fully applied.

That leaves something about this table in particular, and something that fails at request time rather than at deploy time. The first thing I do on Monday is stop reading my own code and read the runtime log, which is what I should have done on Tuesday.

The rest of the week

Waiting, mostly. The advertising review is with Google. The extension is live in both stores. Nothing reached production, and nothing should have — shipping a broken feature to get a green week would be a strange way to run this.