The Consistent Coders

Free, gamified developer job directory for students and early-career engineers in India. Anyone can post a job (+1 point), anyone can apply (+1 point). Points rank members on a public leaderboard.

Stack

• frontend/ — React 19 + Vite + React Router 7. GSAP/Lenis animations. Clerk for sign-in.
• backend/ — Express 5 + Mongoose. Runs as a Vercel serverless function via api/[...path].js, or standalone with npm run dev.

Setup

# backend
cd backend && cp .env.example .env && npm install
# frontend
cd ../frontend && cp .env.example .env && npm install

Fill in:

Variable	Where	Purpose
MONGO_URI	backend	MongoDB Atlas connection string
CLERK_SECRET_KEY, CLERK_PUBLISHABLE_KEY	backend	From dashboard.clerk.com → API keys
VITE_CLERK_PUBLISHABLE_KEY	frontend	Same publishable key
ADMIN_EMAILS	backend	Comma-separated emails that can moderate any job
SITE_URL / VITE_SITE_URL	both	Public origin for canonical URLs + sitemap

Without Clerk keys the site runs read-only (browse jobs, blog, leaderboard); sign-in, posting and applying are disabled.

Run

cd backend && npm run dev      # API on :5000
cd frontend && npm run dev     # Vite on :5173, proxies /api → :5000

Build

cd frontend && npm run build

This does three things: builds the client bundle, builds an SSR bundle, then prerenders every static route and blog post to real HTML in dist/ (see scripts/prerender.mjs). Job detail pages (/jobs/:slug) are rendered on request by GET /api/seo/render/job/:slug, which injects the title, meta, JobPosting JSON-LD and crawlable body into the SPA shell. /sitemap.xml is generated live from the database.

Test

cd backend && npm test          # pure-function checks, no DB needed
cd frontend && npm run lint

Gamification

Four arenas, each with 10 levels, all-time + weekly leaderboards, and a rival ("X pts to overtake …") on the dashboard. Rules live in one place: backend/modules/points/points.service.js (POINT_RULES).

Arena	Action	Points
📚 Learning	Tick off a learning-path checkpoint	+1
	Finish a whole path	+5
🛠️ Building	Submit a project	+3
	Your project gets an upvote	+1
	Complete a mission (GitHub PR link)	+2
📣 Hiring	Post a job	+1
	Your job gets its first applicant	+1
	Review an applicant	+1
🎯 Applying	Apply to a job	+1
	Get shortlisted	+2
General	Daily check-in / add a headline (once)	+1

Every award is idempotent: a unique index on (user, type, ref) means nothing pays twice, even on double-clicks. Overall ranks: Rookie 0 · Contributor 5 · Builder 15 · Architect 40 · Legend 100. 15 badges.

Deploy (Vercel)

Root vercel.json builds frontend/, serves frontend/dist, and routes /api/* to the Express app. Set the env variables above in the Vercel project. Point the domain's non-www host at www (301) in Vercel domain settings so canonicals match.