Why I Built DeedTracker: The Problem You Can't Fix by Rewriting Your Resume
I spent the last year building a tool that I wish had existed for the last ten.
The 2-Hour Tax
If you're a software engineer who's been on the job market in the last few years, you know the drill. You find a job that looks interesting. The description mentions Kubernetes, Go, distributed systems, and "strong communication skills." You have experience in all of those things.
So you open your resume. You tweak the bullet point about the microservices
migration to emphasize the infrastructure piece. You bump Kubernetes up in
your skills section. You rewrite your summary to mention "scalable systems"
three times because that's what the job description says. You save it as resume_companyname_v3_final_actuallyfinal.pdf.
That took you about an hour. Maybe two if you're being honest about it.
Then you find another job. Same process. And another. And another.
If you're applying to ten positions — which is on the low end for a serious job search — that's 10-20 hours of resume tailoring. That's a full work week. For formatting.
This is absurd.
The Deeper Problem
Now, I'm a builder. When something is absurd, my instinct is to build a tool that fixes it. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the resume-tailoring problem is just a symptom of something deeper.
Here's the real problem: We have no good system for keeping track of our careers.
Your resume is probably the only structured record of your professional life. But a resume is a snapshot — it captures where you are right now, not where you've been. When you change jobs, you update the resume and the old version goes into a folder somewhere (if you're organized) or gets overwritten (if you're like most people).
What about the certification you earned three years ago? The conference talk you gave? The project where you reduced infrastructure costs by 40%? The mentoring program you started? If those aren't on your current resume, they effectively don't exist in any organized form.
And when you're applying for a job that needs those exact skills? You scramble to remember the details, dig through old emails, and hope you get it right.
This is a terrible way to manage a career.
The Deed
I started thinking about what the alternative would look like. What if, instead of maintaining a flat document that you constantly rewrite, you kept a structured archive of everything you've accomplished — every project, certification, talk, publication, award, skill — and then generated your resumes from that archive?
I call each individual accomplishment a deed. It's a single, well-documented record of something you did. A deed might be:
- "Led migration of 12 microservices from EC2 to ECS, reducing deployment time by 60%"
- "Earned AWS Solutions Architect certification"
- "Presented 'Scaling PostgreSQL to 10M Users' at PGConf 2025"
Each deed lives in your library with its details — date, impact metrics, associated technologies, supporting documents. Over time, your deed library becomes a complete, structured record of your career.
When you find a job you want, you paste the URL into DeedTracker. The AI reads your deeds, analyzes what the job is asking for, and recommends which accomplishments to feature. You review, tweak if you want, and click generate. Out comes a tailored resume and cover letter for that specific role.
Five minutes. Not two hours.
The Philosophy
Now, I know what you might be thinking. "Great, another AI wrapper that generates generic resumes that all look the same."
I don't want that either. And that's why the design philosophy matters.
DeedTracker starts with your data, not an AI prompt. The AI doesn't invent accomplishments — it selects and wordsmiths from what you have documented. You control the library. You decide what goes in and what stays out. The AI is an editor and a matchmaker, not a ghostwriter.
This might sound obvious, but it's actually a meaningful design choice. Most "AI resume builders" take your existing resume and try to make it better with AI. That's fine, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem — you still have one resume, and it still needs manual tweaking for every role.
DeedTracker's model is different. By treating each accomplishment as a structured data point, the platform can do something a flat document can't: it can match your specific experiences to what an employer is asking for, rank them by relevance, and assemble them into a coherent narrative. That's not just formatting — that's intelligence.
Why Now
Three things converged that made this possible.
First, LLMs got good enough to reliably parse job descriptions and match them to structured data. Two years ago, the AI part of this would have been too unreliable to build a product around. Now it works.
Second, the job market got harder. More people are applying to fewer positions, which means tailoring isn't optional anymore — it's table stakes. A generic resume gets ignored. But manual tailoring is a time sink that compounds across every application.
Third, I finally got tired enough to actually build the thing. It's a pattern I've noticed: the best products come from personal frustration that won't go away. This one had been nagging at me for years.
Where We Are Now
DeedTracker is live. You can sign up, upload your resume (it parses PDF and DOCX), build your deed library, paste in job URLs, and generate tailored resumes and cover letters. The AI Coach is there to help you refine the content. The pipeline tracker keeps your applications organized.
It's early. There are rough edges. The free tier lets you try it with up to 10 deeds and manual job entry. The Pro plan unlocks unlimited deeds, AI generation, and everything else — and it's priced well below most competitors while doing something genuinely different under the hood.
And if you're one of the first people to try it: there's a Founding Member rate, locked in for life for the first subscribers. It's a real discount for people who are willing to help shape what this becomes.
I'm looking for the first cohort of users who want to try it, break it, and tell me what's missing. If that sounds like you, I'd love to have you.
The Invitation
This is a tool built by one person who was frustrated by the same thing you might be frustrated by. It's an Emikra venture, which means it operates under a few principles I take seriously: your data is yours, the product doesn't manipulate you, and success means reducing your drudgery, not increasing your screen time.
If you're job hunting, or planning to be, give it a shot. If it saves you time and helps you land something you're excited about, that's the whole point.
If it doesn't work for you, tell me why. That's how it gets better.