A Mountain of Software I’ve Never Heard Of

I just keep adding to the filters of the job ad filter program I wrote to minimize the noise in my jobsearch. I've got more than 300 regexes just for software packages and platforms I don't know, everything from Cassandra to Laravel to Sharepoint to Terraform, and plenty more obscure ones I've never heard of. It seems like I add to that filter every day. There's no end to the obscure software and platforms that an employer might want a specialist in.

The program is simple: it just applies every regex it has to each line of stdin, and if none of them match the line is printed to stdout. It’s only 30 sloc if you don’t count its regex dict.

I copy job site search output, usually in HTML, and finesse the data until each job ad is just one line of text or markdown. Then I apply the filters, and if anything's left I open those job ads and take a look. It vastly simplifies the process.

I'm just surprised there's not really an end to building its filters. I'm at over 660 regexes total, and it seems like I'll never stop adding to it so long as I'm looking.

19 April 2023