Earlier this year, I decided to write a better job board for tech jobs in South Africa. Specifically, I wanted a place where people could post and look for jobs without having to deal with recruitment agents. Thus, techboard.co.za was born.

I put quite a few days worth of work into the site,  teaching myself Rails 3 as I went along. Alas, after launching it, the big bang I expected never happened. I thought that there would be a big demand for this kind of thing, but it turns out I was wrong.

I also learned the hard way that marketing your product is actually where all the work lies. I decided to push out a lot of PR. I started posting to development boards, emailing people who posted jobs on other sites, started running some running google adwords and even sent out press releases to tech journos. I did get a few job postings and a couple of mentions on twitter and a few tech news sites, but no substantial traffic to speak of. After a while, I stopped marketing the site and it basically just died.

So I’ve decided to open source it in the hopes of it being useful to anyone. It’s basically a clean and simple job board (inspired by 37 signals mostly) that can run on heroku. It’s still running Rails 3, but I will maybe upgrade to 3.1 one day. I will still host the site for the time being (probably until my domain expires), after which it will still be available on github.

Here you go, enjoy and hope you find this useful

https://github.com/michael-erasmus/tekboard

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