I worked on Outstandem for 10 years and it’s time to say goodbye.
When I was looking for my first real job in 2012, I kept every application in an excel sheet.
Every stage in the interview process was tracked in Excel but I knew it could all be better.
Every time my career counselor asked me about the job search I wanted to send a summary report so they could they could help me reach out to alumni at my target companies. So Outstandem was born.
My masters in finance did not teach me to code websites, so I audited CS classes, and thought myself enough Django to build something.
Iteration 1: Outsandem cross referenced school alumni and your active job applications
This was the first iteration of Outstandem. Every time you input a company, it looked up the alumni with the Linkedin API so you could send this list of companies and alumni to the counselors for getting a warm lead. This was a huge personal success. I had never built a website before and it lead me to have a successful and fun job search.
One day, I logged in to see all my Linkedin API requests failing. Linkedin had pulled the rug and discontinued the API.
Iteration 2: Outstandem became a way to mentor job seekers.
People often reach out to me for career advice, especially during the job search stage, and I would sign them up for Outstandem so I can keep tabs on basic statistics:
- How many jobs do they apply for in a week?
- What companies and what stage are people in?
- Are any mentees in the on-site stage?
I continued this for years. I helped CS grads get their first job. I helped a family member with a Masters in CS. This was all manageable because I had a reporting system to let me know when to pick up the phone and make a timely call.
Iteration 3: Outstandem became a technical sandbox
The database layer was MongoDB. Then it was MySQL. Then it was PostgreSQL. The front end was handlebars. Then it was Angular. Then it was React. The Django became Express+Sequelize+Passport.
This was great for learning but is fairly unmaintainable. Now I get 100 emails a day from Heroku since there’s some sort of npm package upgrade that is breaking my db connections. It’s time to sunset.
Was it worth it?
I didn’t have many technical mentors and I never officially studied CS in school. My background is in Finance and Statistics but I’ve never been afraid of learning something new. When I worked in finance in New York I coded on nights and weekends. I attended Django and JavaScript meetups. Outstandem was an outlet for creativity and building. Toys can teach and I encourage people to play.
So yes