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john-smilga/mern-course-jobify
This is the companion codebase for John Smilga's MERN-stack course, a job application tracker (Jobify) built with Express/MongoDB on the backend and React with Context+useReducer on the frontend. It's for developers working through the tutorial step by step, not for anyone looking for a production job board or a library to pull into their own project.
The README is structured as a literal build log, each section maps to a specific commit/feature, so it doubles as a table of contents for the video course and makes it easy to jump to the exact step you're stuck on. The auth flow is genuinely complete end to end: bcrypt hashing via a Mongoose pre-save hook, JWT issuance through a custom schema method, and an auth middleware that rejects malformed or missing Bearer tokens. It also shows Context API + useReducer scaled up to a real app (multiple action types, async thunks inside context methods), which is a reasonable case study before reaching for Redux.
It scaffolds the frontend with create-react-app, which is deprecated and unmaintained, so anyone starting fresh today inherits a dead build toolchain on day one. There are no tests anywhere in the tree and no CI config, so there's nothing to learn about testing this kind of app, only about building it. The JWT setup has no refresh or revocation story, once issued a token is valid for its full lifetime with no way to invalidate it server-side. Stars and forks (274/196) track almost entirely with course enrollment rather than independent adoption, so there's little signal here beyond 'people followed the tutorial.'