Job hunting is a state management problem

Nobody tells you this part. The interviews are the hard bit emotionally, but the thing that actually grinds you down is the bookkeeping — who you applied to, when, through what channel, which recruiter said what, who you owe a follow-up, which of the four roles at the same company you’re actually in the pipeline for.

Most people do it in a spreadsheet. I did too, for a while.

There are good browser-based trackers for this. The one I liked kept everything in local storage, which is genuinely great for privacy and genuinely bad the moment you open your laptop instead of your desktop and none of it is there. Clear the wrong thing and it’s gone entirely.

So I built apptracker: same idea, real database, running on my own cluster. Your data, your box, every device.

What it is

A single static Go binary with the web UI embedded — nothing external to serve, nothing to build at deploy time. It runs on SQLite through the pure-Go driver, so there’s no CGO and the container image is distroless and tiny.

Two modes, one table underneath. Applications tracks the roles: lane, company, role, date, channel, comp, follow-up, status, link, notes. Networking tracks the people, with the same shape pointed at contacts and conversations instead. Statuses run Draft → Applied → Screening → Interviewing → Offer → Rejected → Ghosted, and yes, Ghosted needed to be a first-class status.

A few deliberate calls:

Import and export in JSON and CSV, full-snapshot round-trip. If you can’t get your data back out, it isn’t yours. That’s the whole complaint that started this.
Auth is optional. It runs open by default, because plenty of people want it on a laptop or behind a VPN and a login screen is friction for nothing. Set APP_PASSWORD and it wants a login. Set APP_SESSION_KEY too if it’s long-running, or every restart logs you out.
One file to back up. The SQLite database. That’s the entire disaster recovery plan, and I’ll take a plan I’ll actually follow over a better one I won’t.

The newest bit

v0.4.0 adds a bookmarklet. You’re on a job posting, you hit it, and apptracker opens with the fields already filled from the page. That was the most tedious step in the loop — see posting, switch tabs, retype the company and role and link — and now it’s one click.

It’s open source and it’s boring in the way infrastructure should be. If you’re in a job hunt right now: good luck, genuinely. Track the follow-ups. That’s the part that actually moves things.