Two months creating the code and then one day, you wake up in the morning and you think that. Did i rebuild it?. This is the story of how i created https://contratospublicos.eu.

The context

Two years ago. Pandemic. Not many job opportunities.

My options where:

• Freelance jobs. Discarded too many people in the same situation.

• Working for a company. Discarded because companies stopped contracting people due to the uncertainty of the future.

• Make an onlyfans account. Discarded because even I wouldn't pay to see myself.

Found the platform for public contracts in Spain. Tried to find programming jobs and saw it was horrrible.

I decided i was going to make a better version for me to get the better jobs.

My first mistake

Started programming. The contracts could be found in the website so i created a scrapper to get the Programming jobs. Took me about 2 months to create a scrapper. Create a website and added ElasticSearch to find the contracts.

Found many problems.

• It could take a lot to get the information.

• Since they publish jobs many times a day, you have to keep getting the information all the time.

• The contracts don´t have an strict format so sometimes you don´t get the information.

• The plattform is not very fast.

Now is working

After 2 months everything seems to work reasonably well. Scraping the info is painful but works. Not all the info is correct but enough for me.

Yes. Two full months working on this. I have to say that while i was working on it, saw the utility of it and decided to create something for me but also for others.

I found that this was a real problem and that there are other companies who has portals similar to mine. So i decided to create a SAAS.

A slap in my face

One day, i discover they have an open data page. Yes, i was so concentrated in how to get the data scraping it that didn´t see that.

First though. You are stupid.
Second though. You are the most stupid person in the world.
Third though. What do i do now? 3 options

1. Throw it all by the toilet
2. Keep building what i was building
3. Throw it all, loose 2 months of work and do it properly using the open data.

After a week thinking about it (and a little bit depressed, to be honest) i decided to throw it all and start again.

18 months later i don´t regret what i did. Yes, I lost 2 months of work but now it works great and users keep coming everyday and registering.

Have you ever done something like this or am I the only lout in here? :)