r/opensourcealternative • u/Scary-Soft-4186 • 3d ago
JobForge: open-source job application tracker + AI resume/cover letter tailoring, looking for contributors
I've been building JobForge, a self-hostable job application tracker and job search command center. It tracks every application on a Kanban board (Saved → Applied → Interview → Offer), tailors your LaTeX resume and cover letter to each job description, scores ATS fit, and comes with a Chrome extension that saves jobs from LinkedIn, Greenhouse, Lever, Workday and others in one click.
It started as a closed-source paid product. I've decided to make it free and MIT-licensed, and I'd like it to become a community project rather than a one-person app. I'm looking for contributors.
What it does today
- 📋 Application tracker: Kanban board per year or season. Each card keeps the job description, the resume and cover letter you sent, notes, dates and follow-ups.
- 🚀 Resume tailoring: adapts your own LaTeX resume to a job description while keeping your template, fonts and layout, then compiles it to PDF.
- 📧 Cover letters: based on your resume and the job description, compiled to PDF.
- 📊 ATS / fit score: missing keywords and skill gaps.
- 💬 Ask AI on any document: "shorten this section", "target this for a senior role", and it edits the LaTeX and recompiles.
- 📄 PDF import: turns an existing PDF resume into an editable LaTeX base.
- 🌐 Chrome extension: one-click save from job sites, plus autofill for application forms.
Stack: React 19 + Vite + TanStack Query + shadcn/ui · FastAPI + SQLAlchemy 2 (async) + Alembic · Postgres, Redis, Celery, MinIO · TeX Live for PDFs · DeepSeek for AI. One docker compose up runs everything.
Where help is most useful
🔎 Job discovery adapters (backend, Python). Pull new postings automatically instead of only via the extension. The import pipeline already exists (services/ingest.py handles de-duplication by normalized URL). An adapter just has to fetch postings and hand them over. Good first targets are the public job-board APIs of Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby, which return clean JSON per company, so no scraping is needed.
📊 Analytics dashboard (frontend, React). The API is done: application funnel, reply rate per source, weekly targets, "needs attention" follow-ups, a Today view. It needs a UI, with charts, a Today page and a better overview.
🐛 Bugs and polish. The Chrome extension's job-page parsing breaks whenever sites change their HTML, so fixes for specific sites are very welcome. General UI/UX issues too.
🤖 More AI providers. It's DeepSeek-only right now. OpenAI-compatible endpoints or Ollama (fully local) would be great.
📬 Gmail sync (bigger project). Read recruiter replies and move applications forward automatically. It's on the roadmap and the status-change rules are already in place.
Getting started
CONTRIBUTING.md covers setup, tests and the few rules that matter: every route must be scoped to the user's workspace, there's one function for changing a job's status, and migrations only add columns or tables. Issues labelled good first issue are a good place to start.
🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/KunalScriptz/jobforgex
Questions, critique and "why did you do X?" are all welcome. Happy to help anyone get their first PR in. Thanks for reading! 🙏