The Product & The Loop

Every fall, a CS student applying to internships ends up with the same artifact: a groaning spreadsheet with 80 rows, half-remembered statuses, and a resume that's identical for every company. Wera's bet is that the job hunt isn't a tracking problem — it's a momentum problem. The product's memorable thing is a scoreboard: applied this week vs. quota, rendered like a serious instrument, that makes you want to move the number.

Think of Wera as a flywheel with a gauge bolted to it. Each part of the product exists to remove friction from one push of the wheel: discovery removes "where do I even find postings," tailoring removes "rewriting my resume takes an hour," and the pipeline removes "wait, did I apply to this already?" The gauge — the scoreboard — is what makes you push again tomorrow.

Meet the cast

Before tracing any code, hear the components introduce themselves:

The build journey began on paper

The git history starts with something unusual: two commits of documents before any scaffold. That's not procrastination — it's the cheapest de-risking there is.

Reading the system top-down

Here's the actual home page — the whole read path of a screen, in eleven lines. This is what "server components call stores directly" means:

export default async function Home() {
  const { rows: applications, error } = await loadApplications();

  return (
    <main className="min-h-screen bg-ground text-ink">
      <AppHeader />
      <ScoreboardBand applications={applications} />

The core idea: ship the loop thin

Check your bearings