Tulsa Boom Town… After the Project

5 min readMar 23, 2021

Tulsa Boom Town is a project that was conceived by Tim McMacken. It’s purpose is to address the concern that there is a growing number of tech companies in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area, and for the most part, employers are having to outsource their software developers. As recent graduates of Holberton School’s Foundation Program, a group of us decided to build a website to try to solve that problem. So, Tulsa Boom Town was born. It’s primary mission is to bridge the gap between Tech companies in Tulsa and well qualified software engineers.

The Tulsa Boom Town team included myself, Reese Hicks, I worked primarily on the static website, designing and building from a wire frame to a fully responsive website. My timeline was first week: first major site completed, then the second week getting the responsive aspect to work on all screens. The third week was sourcing images and writing copy, and the fourth week was polishing everything until we had a fully responsive website with zero (one can only hop) spelling errors, that displays nicely on whatever monitor it’s opened with.

The Tulsa Boom Town website wireframe — Tulsa Boom Town Wire-Frame Mock-up

Also on our team was Tim Mcmacken. He was the inspiration for this project, the project was his idea, and to be honest, without him this project would not exist. He was instrumental in making sure we all met our deadlines, and was an “always-on” source for motivation. His timeline included building the wireframe I used for the design in the “zero-week”, making decisions as to which server platform we would use in the second week as well as corresponding with Tulsa tech companies for cooperation with our project. His third week was dedicated to solidifying that cooperation we see across the site with local Tulsa tech companies, and his fourth week was dedicated to building a pretty swell twitter bot, designed to engage on the Twitter platform.

The Tulsa Boom Town Website Landing Page

The member of our team who performed all of the JavaScript sorcery was Jacob Wagner. He has a pretty solid JavaScript background, and he took my responsive designs and wrote some really great scripts that make the site able to populate job postings that we scraped from the web every time you open the site’s job page. His timeline was based off of my “got-it-done-ness”, and because of that, his first week was mostly spent waiting on me to hand him some halfway decent HTML & CSS. Into week two, though, Jacob had a flask app written up and working, as well as an API for the site to make calls to our jobs database. No simple feat here. As I stated before, pure sorcery working into week three, where Jacob and I hammered out CSS that would look great and serve up custom content for a carousel I wrote. A little back and forth via a Google-Meet never hurt anyone (I don’t think). After that was wrapped up, Jacob’s week four was spent making the Flask app persistent, so he didn’t have to maintain an SSH connection to our server, in order to serve our dynamic content. Fantastic work there, in my humble opinion.

A Peek at the Tulsa Boom Town JavaScript

The fourth member of our team was Blake Stewart. He was the one who made the final call on our hosting platform and stack. In fact, his whole first week was dedicated to researching all the different platforms, AWS, Google, and we even looked at Digital Ocean. Blake ended up choosing the Google platform for us, and he was the man who maintained that whole ecosystem for us. Blake was also the guy in charge of all the web scraping. I have to say, our first choice was working with a jobs platform, and leveraging their API to populate our postings, but seeing as our funding was basically at zero dollars, Blake stepped in, learned how to web scrape, and actually pulled off grabbing consistent jobs data for our own database. His weeks two and three were knee-deep in the web-scrape, and it paid off in week four, as our jobs board not only provides a local search, but it even has a remote section, if you’re looking to do a remote focused job hunt in the Tulsa area.

In all, we individually took on extremely interesting jobs that played a huge role in the completion of this project. I would dare to say that Tulsa Boom Town is a jobs board with a bit of pizzazz for the local Tulsa scene including things to do in Tulsa and ways to get involved in the emerging tech scene. It showcases not only job postings here in the local area, but also ways to get involved with the development of our great little city. Some would say that Tulsa is undergoing a pivot from oil to tech, and I personally wanted to be involved in that wild ride. I saw Tulsa Boom Town as a way to get myself involved in the local tech scene, get my feet wet here in the Tulsa area, and even possibly find myself a new career in the process. So if you’re an employer looking to fill a software engineer role, please refer to the above four aforementioned names. We’re four pretty decent guys looking for work in a software engineering (or similar) role.

Here’s the link for the above described project:

http://www.tulsaboomtown.tech