I am unemployed! It’s great!
I have been (deliberately) out of work since June 2022. It’s been a magical time!
- I tried a lot of new recipes
- I spent time on my side-project bostadsbussen
- I visited Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Nepal (Hiking Himalayas), Turkey, Italy, France
- I slept a lot
- I spent time with family
But I also used a lot of my savings.
So I’m looking for a job.
Anyone who has looked for a job has probably had this exchange:
<Monday>
Recruiter 1: Can I schedule a call? When are you free?
Alex: I'm free on Wednesday from 9 to 12.
Recruiter 2: Can I schedule a call? When are you free?
Alex: I'm free on Wednesday from 9 to 12.
Recruiter 1: Great, I'll call you on Wednesday at 9.
<Tuesday>
Recruiter 2: Great, I'll call you on Wednesday at 9.
A classic race condition! Now I need to reach out to Recruiter 2 and re-schedule.
Then I would need to submit a time-slot again, which could create another race condition with a hypothetical Recruiter 3
This can result in a back and forth email chain just to find a suitable time. That is not very productive!
So how can we solve this problem?
If my calendar was online the recruiters could find suitable times themselves.
So let’s put it on a web page!
I use Proton Calendar, which has an option to export my calender as an ICS link:
That gives us an ics subscription link, which can be imported into a calendar. But expecting busy recruiters to figure that out is not really respecting their time.
I found Open Web Calendar which will generate an iframe that can be pasted anywhere.
It was easily deployed to my Raspberry Pi! You can see the result below or on dahl.dev/calendar
The UI breaks a little bit on mobile devices. But I think recruiters will be using a desktop when scheduling. After this job hunt I might spend some time on creating a PR that fixes that 🤓!
No more scheduling conflict. I actually started using it for my job hunt and I have gotten good feedback from the recruiters. They said it made their job so much easier!
So now all my interactions look like this instead:
<Monday>
Recruiter 1: Can I schedule a call? When are you free?
Alex: You can see my availability on dahl.dev/calendar
Recruiter 2: Can I schedule a call? When are you free?
Alex: You can see my availability on dahl.dev/calendar
Recruiter 1: Great, I'll call you on Wednesday at 9.
<Tuesday>
Recruiter 2: Great, I'll call you on Wednesday at 10.