NodeFlair is a platform that provides job search, salary information, and career development tools for the tech industry.

NodeFlair

NodeFlair is a Career Transparency platform with verified career data - salaries, culture, benefits, & more. Our mission is to help Tech Talents make better career decisions.

For Companies: we help hire top-tier Tech Talents across APAC.

Brain-Too-Free Ventures

Henry Chan

JJ Chai

Poh Kam Wong

Yuzuru Honda

Quest Ventures

NodeFlair - Tech Salaries, Jobs & more

We just released our Asia Tech Salary Report 2024!

1. Detailed tech salaries across Asia!
2. Salary trend compared to the year before
3. Top searched companies
4. Deep dive analysis of top search companies
5. Comparing talent trends across Asia
6. Hiring insights 2024

Check out the free report! https://bit.ly/3TGHz4k

Our free Resume Checker has exploded in popularity with a 46x increase in usage over the past six months. This means more people are using it now in a day than we had in an entire month back then - that's wild!

So, I decided to fine-tune the code, and what started out as a quick fix ended up with a logic that is ~62x faster. We went from 1.550s down to a mere 0.025s. You hit the button the results pop up in a split second - literally.

You may ask how (you probably didn't)—I refactored a piece of code that was running repeatedly in every loop, so now it runs just once.

Another day, another straightforward enhancement that leads to massively better user experience.

⚡ Our app is up to 4x faster! 
Here's how we did it with one simple tweak.

🐌 The Problem with Localization

When we first receive a request, we need to figure out where the user is so we can serve up the right language. 

So, we make a request to a 3rd-party Geolocation API to get the user's country.

The API's website claims an average latency of 50ms. But we're facing a gruesome 300ms latency - perhaps due to our servers being located in Singapore.

🧡 The Rescue

Since we're already hooked up to Cloudflare, we can leverage their `CF-IPCountry` header to retrieve the user's country code instead. And only if that's invalid, we'll resort to the geolocation API. 

The result? We can avoid that pesky API call for most requests, shaving off a whopping 300ms from our RTT (Round Trip Time). 

💚 It's a Win-Win

The biggest winners are our users - a significantly snappier experience.

And we've effectively turbocharged our concurrency and achieving a higher RPS (Requests Per Second). Getting more done with fewer resources is NodeFlair - Tech Salaries, Jobs & more bread and butter — who wouldn't love that?

Has what you look for in a company shifted over the past year?

🚀 Update: We've reduced the CI build time by another 10%, while slashing costs to (almost) zero.

After my previous post, I dove deep into the world of third-party GitHub Action runners and found two standouts that fit our scale and needs at NodeFlair - Tech Salaries, Jobs & more & more perfectly.

Blacksmith offers pricing that matches BuildJet’s rates (50% cheaper than GitHub's). They have one of the fastest CI builds according to online benchmarking by leveraging on gaming CPUs. Their collocated cache blows away the competition with speeds up to 7x faster in our benchmarks (from 100MB/s to 700MB/s). They also provide a generous 25GB of free cache storage. 

Most importantly, you get a whopping 3000 free minutes per month. 

Bonus: their co-founder Aayush Shah is incredibly responsive via email. Always a pleasure to support fellow hustlers who get it.

If your scale and workflows demand more, check out Ubicloud. They deliver the same compute power at 10x less than GitHub’s cost—by far the friendliest pricing on the market, outstripping all the competition.

Sure, there are other contenders out there, but none seem to match the offerings—be it in performance or pricing—of these three players. Either that or their lackluster online presence fails to inspire confidence. Thus, we opted not to roll the dice on them.

We made our CI 2.86x faster, 83% cheaper 🚀
Here's how:

But firstly, why is a fast build for CI crucial? Because it keeps your momentum alive by providing quicker feedback, preventing the soul-sucking downtime that kills productivity.

🐌 And here's why our CI build at NodeFlair - Tech Salaries, Jobs & more were taking so long:

1) GitHub Action is slow - initializing container alone takes 1 minute.

2) Tests run slow - we were running them one after another.

Apparently if you are unlucky, GitHub will run your workflow with old hardware from 2015. In comparison, me running it locally on my M2 MacBook Air is ~3x faster.

🚀 So here's how we solved it:

1) Running tests in parallel - our runners have 2vCPU so they can run the tests concurrently - cutting time taken to run tests by 16%. (FYI fellow Rails folks, we are using Flatware)

2) Switching to BuildJet runners. By changing 1 line of code, overall build time drops by 33% - it's 50% cheaper too!

3) Also switching to BuildJet cache - 20GB instead of GitHub's 10GB. With a larger cache, there's a higher probability that previously cached dependencies will still be available for subsequent builds, reducing the need to fetch them again.

And here’s the kicker: BuildJet is not only 50% cheaper per minute, but with its blazing-fast runners, we’re slashing our CI costs by up to 83%. This isn’t some paid shill — I’m telling you to give it a go yourself. See the difference firsthand.

Once again, the art of doing more with less fuels my passion. It’s how we scale swiftly and stay lean.

💡 UPDATE: We switched to Blacksmith because it's even faster and cheaper - 3x faster, 6x cheaper! https://lnkd.in/gyJYkupk

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