Public developer profiles and paywalled search results

[joemasilotti]

I spoke with a colleague today who's in a similar space – they also help Rails developers in their career. They mentioned that developers want a place to share their portfolio, a bit about themselves, and some links. But didn’t know where to direct them. I think RailsDevs can fill that gap.

Tangentially related, I no longer see the value in guests to the site being able to browse every single developer profile. It’s asking for folks to cheat the system, scrape information, or worse. I’ve kept it public out of simplicity but I think it’s tighten it up a bit more. The bonus is that by hiding content from guests the value of a subscription increases.

Goals

1. Encourage developers to share their RailsDevs profile directly with potential employers.
2. Increase the value of subscriptions by hiding more content from non-subscribers.

I believe that these two goals can be achieved with two new and related features: public profile pages and hiding the second (and beyond) page of search results.

Public RailsDevs profiles

I’d love for developers to be able to share their RailsDevs profile with a potential employer. But right now it feels kind of weird – the employer can’t see their social links or the developer’s real name. And a big “Hire me” button that kicks off a registration flow is kind of weird in this scenario.

Instead, what if developers could get a unique, custom link to share privately? This could reveal the hidden content so an employer can get all the information on a single page.

I’m not worried about losing out on the subscription or hiring fee here. If a developer is privately sharing this link then RailsDevs isn’t the source of the connection. And therefore shouldn’t be entitled to compensation.

One concern I have with this is if someone posts the link on Twitter or other social media platforms. I can’t do anything to stop them but it doesn’t feel like it fits the spirit of the feature.

Implementation details

These to-dos should outline actionable, bite-sized chunks of work to launch this feature.

1. Access developer profiles via slug, only (e.g. /developers/1 → /developers/abc123)
   • Add a new column to the database, developers.slug
   • Index the column
   • Randomly generate the slug for each existing developer in a backfill script
   • Generate a new slug when a developer is created
   • In the controller, find the developer by the slug
   • Ensure linking to developers works via developer_path(developer)
     • This might require overriding Developer#to_param and updating the routes.
   • Ensure “old” developer routes (e.g. /developers/1) return a 404
   • Notes:
     • I’m not interested in bringing in a 3rd party gem like friendly_id (yet). It feels like way overkill and there’s currently no need for history or even friendly URLs.
     • Ideally this fits into Rails as much as possible, so something like UUID primary keys might work better than a custom slug implementation.
2. Publicly shareable URLs
   • Add a new column to the database, developers.public_profile_key
   • Randomly generate the column for each existing developer in a backfill script
   • Generate a new value when a developer is created
   • Unhide hidden information on a developers profile page if this key is present in the key param (e.g. /developers/abc123?key=xyz987)
     • This will require editing the view components to accept an “override” option of sorts and might be a good candidate for a refactor.
   • Add a new button next to “Edit” when viewing your own developer profile titled “Share” – when clicked copy the link to the clipboard
3. Publicly shareable URLs polish
   • When the “Share” button is clicked show a modal explaining how the public page works
   • A Cancel buttons closes the modal
   • A “Copy link” button copies the link to the clipboard

Hide page 2+ of search results

These two features are related because without anonymizing the developer profile URL hiding the 2nd page of search results doesn’t do much. Someone could crawl it, even manually.

Note that if someone has a direct link to a profile that will still work, even if they don’t have a subscription.

I thought about removing the infinite scroll but I think it should play nicely with the CTA. It will appear without more interaction from the user, which is ideal.

Implementation details

These to-dos should outline actionable, bite-sized chunks of work to launch this feature.

1. Set pagination page size to 10 (from 20) for /developers
2. Hide page 2+ of search results for non-subscribers
   • When page 2+ of /developers is hit render a CTA (not the developer profiles)
   • CTA design can be copied from the PaywalledComponent for now
   • Copy should include that a subscription is required to see more profiles and the total number of developers on the site
   • Ensure that continuing to scroll doesn’t load page 3
   • Ensure that accessing page 3+ directly from the URL shows the CTA, only
3. Paywall location and timezone search, too
   • Require an active subscription to filter by location and/or timezone
   • This includes the UI (like text search) and updating the Pundit policy
4. Revamp CTA design
   • Replace CTA design with a static list of developers blurred out
   • Overlay the copy and button on top of this list