H1B salary viewer

Some background into this project

In early 2017 Roger Hau and I decided to do an experiment- how much effort would it take to make $100/month in passive income from running ads/affiliate links on simple internet webapp and/or content play.

I also wanted to learn react/es6 and other modern web dev technologies since at work I was stuck using Saltarelle (C# transpiled to Javascript).

So we decided to emulate some of these h1b salary databases (i.e. https://h1bdata.info), put some ads/affiliate links, and see what we could do!

After a few months, we had a built product, with arguably better UI than some of the most popular H1B salary databases (we had autocomplete, single-page app, responsive design). Unfortunately, we found out that the game of internet traffic -> passive income is mostly an exercise in SEO and content marketing. After a few months of trying that (example of marketing on quora here, we gave up and concluded that trying to make $100/month passive income using ads alone is pretty hard.

Anyways, so here's the code we wrote. Architecture consists of:

• React/es6 front end - see scripts
• Simple Golang backend that issues requests to database - see src/pi
• Nginx web server (see nginx)
• MySQL database running in Google cloud (unfortunately configuration was not backed up in code, but it was basically a dump of excel files from US Department of Labor's website into MySQL)

Our domain was h1bdata.us which pointed to a Google cloud machine that is now used by Trifecta Wrangler (see the redirection from h1bdata.us)

One of these days, I'll clean up the code/README so that deployment is even simpler, officially open source it (maybe folks would find it useful for displaying any sort of "giant spreadsheet as a webapp"), and deploy an instance of it.

-Steven

quick start for development

1. Cd into this directory:
2. run the following command

source dev_init.sh

Go server

All code is contained in src/pi directory

Database

Connecting to database

brew install mysql
mysql -u rhau -p -h 146.148.32.104 h1b

starting the server

cd .
brew install go

cd src/pi
go get
go build
chmod +x pi
./pi

You should now be able to hit http://localhost:8000/ and see a bunch of data

Javascript client

All code is contained in scripts directory, plus a bunch of extraneous stuff at root directory (TODO move that all into client director)

Starting the client

Make sure you are running node v7.7.1, npm > 4

npm install
npm start

Open http://localhost:5000 to test http://localhost:5000/webpack-dev-server/index.html to developer-mode

Linting

ESLint with React linting options have been enabled.

npm run lint

Pushing to production

Manual testing prod locally, feel free to skip

1. Run npm run build to build prod/bundle.js file
2. Openindex.html to test locally in browser without the webpack dev server present

You must run this: 3. Follow these instructions for how to get access into prod machine and push changes https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Lu2ARPiW7Zrr2JQUu_CkHCMf-KtDiKCKGvYPRfY5PM/edit#

based on https://github.com/stevenqzhang/react-es6-webpack-boilerplate

Boilerplate for kick starting a project with the following technologies:

• React
• Babel 6
• Webpack for bundling
• Webpack Dev Server
• React Transform for hot reloading React components in real time.