TUBjobs

Since I started a blog and have a projects section, Is hould better add some projects of my own. This is the Twitter Bot that I have built some time ago.

I study at the Technical University of Berlin. I worked multiple student jobs in various departments at the university and I found those jobs from the job portal of the university. But many students are not aware of the existence of this website because it is not advertised and hard to find. I did a quick search and could not find it. Maybe it is gone I do not know. But it was always hard to find anyways.

So I decided to build a twitter bot that tweets the jobs when they are published and a day before their application deadline. So that it is more accessible to people and they can be notified whenever there is a new job or an application deadline is coming. The bot is unfortunately not active anymore. I think at some point my Azure credit was exhausted and the service stopped itself. But if you want to check it out, here is a link to it: TUBjobs.

How did I build it?

That is a good question whose answer I do not recall. So I checked the Github repository and tried to remember what I did. You can check the Github repository here: TUBjobScraper. At the time, I guess I was being lazy and did not write any README.md. Shame 😅. Alright, let’s get into it.

So like I mentioned before, there is this website of the Technical University of Berlin where the job posts are anounced. To get the job posts I first looked for a way to parse the website. After some research, I found out that beautifulsoup is the right library for the job. I parsed the website using beautifulsoup looking at to the html tags. I tried to collect as many useful information as possible that will fit in a tweet.

Then I wrote the fetched jobs in a text file in blob storage on Azure. Each time I wanted to tweet, the freshly parsed jobs were compared to the blob storage, and if the job is not existing in the storage it would be added to the new jobs set. The jobs in the blob storage would also be checked to see if the job application deadline is tomorrow. If that is the case the job would be added to the ending jobs set. After I had collected all the jobs, I prepared them in a tweet format that I liked and tweeted them using tweepy which is a python library to access the Twitter API.

This whole process was repeated daily triggered by a cron job usign Azure Lambda functions and blob storage. For more details check the Github repository. Below you can find the last tweet that was tweeted by the Twitter bot TUBjobs.