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Worklist Job Board

PostgreSQL full-text search + payment webhooks

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A job board with proper search. Built to learn PostgreSQL full-text search and payment webhook handling.

Project is no longer running - this is a retrospective.

TL;DR

  • Implemented Postgres full-text search (ranking > naive LIKE).
  • Made payments reliable via server-to-server webhooks (not browser redirects).

Tech Stack: Django PostgreSQL SSLCommerz API

The two interesting bits in this project were search and payments. Everything else was normal CRUD.

Search: why not just LIKE?

LIKE '%python developer%' is the obvious approach, but it lacks relevance ranking and stemming, and it is sensitive to word order.

PostgreSQL has built-in full-text search. You create a SearchVector on your text columns, query with SearchQuery, and get ranked results with stemming and stop-word handling for free:

from django.contrib.postgres.search import SearchVector, SearchQuery

Job.objects.annotate(
    search=SearchVector('title', 'description')
).filter(search=SearchQuery('python developer'))

No Elasticsearch needed. The database handles indexing, ranking, and query parsing. A detailed write-up is here: Simple and Efficient Full-Text Search using Django and Postgres

Payments: why webhooks matter

Job posts required payment before going live. The naive approach: user pays → redirect back → activate post. Problem: what if the redirect fails? User paid but post never activates.

The fix was SSLCommerz webhooks. The payment processor calls the backend endpoint on success regardless of frontend redirect behavior, so post activation is decoupled from the browser session.

User pays → SSLCommerz processes → Webhook fires → Post activates
                                      ↑
                         (happens server-to-server)

Deployment

EC2 + RDS + Nginx + Gunicorn + SSL. Standard Django production setup on AWS.