data - psyphi.net blog

My Job Application Journey

I’ve been applying to jobs for a few months now and I’m beginning to wonder whether AI has eaten them all. Not only the jobs but the companies I’m applying to as well. Being reasonably-well organised, I started keeping track of my applications and their states from day one. I should have used the CRM I wrote back in the 2000s but I needed more immediacy in the data entry and access (todo: feature request) so I used Google Sheets.

It became clear to me very quickly that a large proportion of these roles had something wrong with them – either basic details missing, usually no salary specified, or simply nobody on the other end of the application. I’m used to HR teams and processes being pretty crap most of the time, but this seems to be something else – no responses to direct applications, no responses to agency applications, duplicate vacancies clearly being reposted on LinkedIn within days of the original – what gives?

My go-to in these days of modern AI-enlightenment is that the role, the company, the candidate tracking system, or all of the above have probably been eaten by AI, but to what end? Simply harvesting details seems like a glorious waste of time, and from my many years of being on the receiving end of thousands of applications (and hiring lots of developers), the quality of a reasonable chunk of those rejected applications wouldn’t be good enough to use for model training unless you’re demonstrating what not to do.

Anyway, as my list of failed applications nears one hundred (since Feb 2025), I find myself with a reasonably complete, therefore reasonably decent quality dataset, albeit one with questionable utility, to screw about with in D3. Go play with it here because wordpress is a bit naff at embedding nice-sized iframes.

Bookmarks for December 4th through January 10th

These are my links for December 4th through January 10th:

Examine Any Site’s HTTP Headers –
SecondSync, social media analytics for TV –
Micro Elastix – mini asterisk (voip pbx) installation for raspberry pi
tinc wiki – cross-platform, opensource, hamachi-like, p2p vpn
Robomongo — shell-centric MongoDB management tool (MongoDB Admin UI) – cross-platform mysql query browser for mongo

Multivariate Charts from HTML tables in D3.js

For a dynamic monovariate (single line) chart, please see my earlier post – http://psyphi.net/blog/2013/04/charts-from-tables-with-d3js-and-jquery/.

Sometimes you just have to plot more than one dataset on the same chart, but you might have a complex data table with some “collections” of single-values and some collections of multiple values. Here I’ve put together an example from something I’ve been working on recently. Once your back-end queries (SQL or whatever) are written and your templates convert those data into basic HTML tables, you can plot then straight to SVG/D3 without much extra work.

Nearly all of that extra work is around adding appropriate classes to cells to distinguish columns and collections of columns. The rest is to extract those cells out again and decide which should be plotted together.

In this example, tabs and table headings belong to classes “collection_#” “a_c#” where the collection_# identifies a set of columns to be displayed together and the a_c# identifies the (links for the) columns themselves. Collections with multiple columns therefore have a single collection class but contain more than one a_c# class.

Next each table tbody td data cell belongs to a c# class, one for each column. Each one is also uniquely identified by a td#_<date> which allows hovers on the table cell to highlight the SVG data point and vice versa. Next each cell contains a span with a “val” class (more on that in the next post).

SVG paths may now be built for each column. Clicks on table-headings and tabs are able to examine which columns co-display because they belong in the same collection and then scale and plot them appropriately.

Note that the first and last tabs in this example plot single lines to demonstrate mixed collections in action. The middle two tabs have two lines each but there’s no reason why you couldn’t have more (although there are only seven colours listed at the moment).