Peter Lorenz
Managing Director
peter.lorenz@akra.de
+49 40 309535 40
Evolution of a market leader
academics
2017
Job search, next level
academics.de is the job platform for academic job ads. Since 2017, we have been developing it iteratively in an agile process in close collaboration with the customer. From conception to production deployment, we accompany all new features and enable smooth operation and a new ability to act with a lived DevOps culture.
The Client
As a job market for academic job offers, academics.de has been the market leader for over ten years. Because the platform cooperates with colleges, universities, and research institutes and integrates job advertisements it has created itself, it can present its users with the latest job offers. Search preferences such as department, industry and other relevant key data are stored in user-specific search profiles and new hits are delivered daily or weekly by newsletter. In addition to the job search, the portal also offers a wide range of industry-specific advice articles on topics such as job applications, salaries and promotion.
The Challenge
At the start of the collaboration in 2017, operation and maintenance of the platform was the responsibility of the previous technical service provider. The monolithic Java application was used simultaneously as a website, content management system and for newsletter distribution. The tight coupling made it impossible to scale the individual components separately, and the editorial team had to contend with long waiting times during administration. Inconsistencies in the data model, which had arisen over the course of ten years of development, made it difficult to make reliable statements about the data stock. A possible failure would also have affected the entire platform.
The Solution
Working closely with the customer, we developed a new, service-oriented architecture that separately encapsulated the various domains of the platform and made them independently scalable and maintainable. In a comprehensive data migration, we then transferred the existing data into a new, consistent data model.
For the relaunch of the platform, the focus was first on the redevelopment of an individualized CMS solution. After taking over the distribution of 500,000 newsletters per week, we finally improved the search: In order to present users with even more relevant and individualized job ads, we expanded the search function to include domain-specific expertise, in this case in the form of an ontology or taxonomy. To increase interactivity, we transformed the search dialog into an "integrated app" (SPA) with an optimized structure. For more visibility, we also provided business and technical metrics in the form of monitoring, reporting and alerting.
Services
- Architecture
- Implementation and operation
- UX analysis and consulting
- Development and use of a design pattern library
- Alerting, monitoring and reporting
- Agile Coaching
Methods
- Project specific version of Scrum (Dailies, Reviews, Refinements, Pre-Refinements, Retros)
- CI/CD with GitLab CI and TDD
- DevOps through containerization, automation, GitOps and Infrastructure as Code
Technologies
- Elixir in the backend, GraphQl API with Absinthe
- Elasticsearch for search in front- and backend
- Vue.js SPA for the editorial CMS
- Ruby on Rails, Vue.js incl. SSR (Server Side Rendering) for academics.de
- HTML, SCSS/SASS, JavaScript
- Grafana, Prometheus for monitoring & alerting
- Elastic Cloud, Logstash & Beats for logging and log analysis.
- Docker, Kubernetes, Helm
- Gitlab CI, Google Cloud Platform, Terraform
More projects
New projects: Welcome!
Here at AKRA, we love every new challenge. We look forward to receiving inquiries, questions or a first hello at:
