I made Platsbanken work for me

While using Platsbanken for quite a while I got more and more frustrated with it. Not for any obvious particular reason, it is just a workflow I don't like. When working with long lists and filtering through datasets, it is tedious with a pagination of 20 posts per page. If you want to delve through hundreds or thousands of posts per day and quickly stay updated on your very specific filters with where and what to work with, and what keywords to use, the web browser with dropdown lists and a huge amount of ads split into bunches of 20 is not swift.

So I started to get an itch. I was almost 100% certain that Arbetsförmedlingen didn't have any open API endpoints, but still I dove down the rabbit hole to see what I could find. And to my surprise I found a website called https://dataportal.se that has gathered all official government and state APIs at one place. I searched for Platsbanken and lo and behold, I found something; https://jobstream.api.jobtechdev.se/

I am still not sure if it's an official, half-official or unofficial API, but it keeps itself updated and holds an updated snapshot of all the ads in Platsbanken. It has all the endpoints needed to have your own copy of platsbanken right in your computer. This gave me an idea - how about a terminal app with commands and arguments? No pagination, no dropdowns, no questionable design choices, no nothing. I could decide for myself what was relevant and what I could leave out.

What started as a bash script has now ended in a Python application. You can find it at https://github.com/teddiewallie/platsbanken

I am very happy with it. It has update abilities, so I can fetch the latest ads, as well as any existing ads that has been removed and updated:

I have a separate json file where I specify filters I can use to narrow down searches. I also have flags so that I can narrow down the list of ads to only show the new ones for today, or for specific keywords, or anything else.

The application can of course also show a single ad.

Best of all - if I get a new idea, the implementation is just a few lines of code away. I love open APIs.

You can find the source code at https://github.com/teddiewallie/platsbanken