CareerOS

Every job application pulled me in two directions. I could tailor the CV and the cover letter properly, which took hours, or I could send something generic and hope. On top of that I was losing track of what I had already sent, and to whom.

There are tools that solve this. They also want a subscription for the privilege of holding my career history on their servers. That felt like a bad trade for something I could build.

CareerOS starts with a knowledge base rather than a document. Every role, responsibility, skill, course, certificate, and conference goes in, along with what actually came of it. The CV is a view over that database, not the database itself.

When a job comes in, the app reads it against the knowledge base. The useful part is what happens when a role looks like nothing I have done before, because it still surfaces the transferable responsibilities and skills that carry over, which is exactly the connection I would have missed writing the thing by hand at midnight. There is also an analytics view with match scores, so I can see which applications were actually worth the effort.

Built with FastAPI on the backend and React on the front, running entirely on my own machine.

Status: fully built and running locally. Not yet deployed.

The knowledge base was the whole project. Once the underlying record of what I had actually done was complete and honest, generating a tailored CV stopped being a writing problem and became a retrieval problem. I had been solving it at the wrong layer for years.