dayinthelife
Short videos instead of job descriptions, in a TikTok-style feed for sales and customer service roles.
- Role
- Engineering
- When
- 2022 – 2023
- Stack
- Next.js, tRPC, Prisma, MySQL, Mux, AWS Lambda, Tailwind
The brief
dayinthelife wanted to replace written job adverts with short videos showing what a role is actually like. The founders already had designs and needed someone to build the product on a startup budget. It had to work as well on a phone as on a laptop.
What I built
Video uploads that just work. Phones upload large videos in resumable chunks straight to Mux, using a signed upload link, so the footage never passes through our servers. Mux handles encoding and streaming, and its asset details are mirrored into the database.
A feed that feels like TikTok. Roles snap into place as you scroll. The video in view plays automatically, the others pause, and mute is one setting across the whole feed.
Roles near you first. The feed is ranked by distance from the job seeker, with a manual order on top so the team could curate it.
Employer accounts. Companies have several users with admin rights, invite emails, application tracking and click tracking on outbound apply links.
A cheap image pipeline. An upload to S3 triggers a Lambda that resizes the image and writes the result back. I later reused the same stack for RaffClub.
To keep running costs low, it leaned on managed services, but in a way that wouldn’t lock the product into any one of them.
Where it ended up
dayinthelife was taken offline in 2023 after it didn’t find enough traction. The quote on the home page is from the dayinthelife team.