Launchboard

Launchboard is a small Rails job board built as a portfolio project. It demonstrates how a conventional Ruby on Rails app is structured around MVC, RESTful routing, Active Record associations, request tests, seed data, and a lightweight admin workflow.

What it does

• Public landing page with featured jobs and recent openings
• Search and filter jobs by company, location, and remote-only status
• Public job detail page with a candidate application form
• Admin dashboard protected with HTTP Basic Auth
• Admin CRUD flows for companies and jobs
• Seed data so the app looks finished immediately after setup

Stack

• Ruby 4.0.1
• Rails 7.2.3
• SQLite3
• Minitest

Project structure

• Company has many Job records
• Job belongs to a Company and has many JobApplication records
• JobApplication belongs to a Job

The public side lives in:

• HomeController
• JobsController
• JobApplicationsController

The admin side lives in:

• Admin::DashboardController
• Admin::CompaniesController
• Admin::JobsController

Local setup

1. Ensure Ruby 4.x and Bundler are available.
2. Install dependencies:

bundle install

3. Create and seed the database:

bin/rails db:setup

4. Start the app:

bin/rails server

Then open http://localhost:3000.

Admin demo credentials

The admin section uses HTTP Basic Auth.

• Username: admin
• Password: launchboard-demo

You can override these with environment variables:

export ADMIN_USERNAME=myuser
export ADMIN_PASSWORD=mypassword

Running tests

bin/rails test

Notes for a job application

This app is intentionally small, but it shows the Rails fundamentals that matter in a junior-to-mid-level portfolio project:

• Active Record associations and validations
• Clean REST routes
• Server-rendered forms
• Namespaced admin controllers
• Seeded demo data
• Request and model tests

Next improvements

• Authentication for real multi-user accounts
• Pagination for larger job lists
• Richer application review workflow
• File uploads for resumes
• Deploy to Render, Fly.io, or Heroku-style hosting