Dotmap update: Quick Search, Postgres, and smarter skill ranking
A few updates on Dotmap since the last post.
Quick Search: guided discovery
The sidebar filter worked, but it required too much upfront knowledge. You had to know which skills existed, which cities had professionals, and how to combine them.
Quick Search flips that around. It's a three-step wizard:
- Pick a skill — shows popular skills first, with a search box for specifics
- Pick a location — countries and cities, filtered by where professionals with that skill actually exist
- See results — professionals matching your criteria, ready to explore
The key insight: each step narrows the next. If you pick "Laravel," the location step only shows places where Laravel developers are registered. No more dead-end searches.
It sounds obvious in hindsight. It wasn't obvious when the filter sidebar had 47 possible combinations.
Postgres migration
Dotmap now runs on PostgreSQL instead of MySQL.
The migration itself was straightforward — Laravel's database abstraction meant zero code changes. But the real reason for switching wasn't compatibility. It was pgvector.
pgvector is a Postgres extension for vector similarity search. Store embeddings alongside your data, then query by semantic similarity. "Find professionals similar to this one" becomes a single SQL query instead of a machine learning pipeline.
I haven't built the similarity features yet. But the foundation is there. Profile embeddings are generated on save, stored in a vector column, and indexed for fast retrieval.
When I do build semantic search, it'll be a feature flag flip, not an infrastructure project.
Skill weights
Not all skills are equal. Someone who lists Laravel as their primary expertise — with portfolio projects and work experience to prove it — should rank differently than someone who added it as an afterthought.
Dotmap now calculates skill weights based on:
- Portfolio items — projects tagged with the skill
- Work experience — jobs where the skill was used
- Proficiency level — self-reported expertise
The weights update automatically when you add or edit portfolio items or work experience. No manual ranking required.
On profile pages, skills now show strength indicators. Your strongest skills appear first, with visual badges showing relative expertise.
For search results, this means better relevance. When you search for "React developers," you get people who actually work with React, not people who tried it once in a tutorial.
Cleaner skill presentation
While reworking the skill system, I noticed the same problem many apps have: inconsistency. Skills looked different on profile pages than in search results. Cards showed colors that popups didn't. Small things, but they add up to a product that feels unfinished.
So I unified everything. Skills now look the same everywhere — on your profile, in search cards, on the map popup. The color scheme is simpler too: a subtle gradient from light to dark based on expertise level, with a slight accent for expert-level skills.
The goal was to reduce visual noise while still making expertise levels scannable at a glance. Your top skills stand out. Everything else fades into the background without disappearing entirely.
The compounding effect
These three features connect:
Quick Search uses skill weights to show the most relevant professionals first. Postgres enables the vector queries that will power "similar professionals" in the future. And the skill weight system creates the training data for those embeddings.
None of them are revolutionary alone. Together, they make the platform noticeably smarter.
Join the map
Dotmap only works if there are professionals to discover. That's where you come in.
Claiming your spot is free. You create a profile, pin yourself on the map, and that's it. No subscription, no premium tiers, no strings attached.
And unlike LinkedIn, you won't get spammed by recruiters. Dotmap doesn't have an InMail equivalent. No one can "connect" with you or flood your inbox with templated messages. Your profile is visible, but you control who reaches out and how.
If you're a developer, designer, or creative professional: claim your spot. Be discoverable on your own terms.
Ready to claim your spot? We're opening up to a small group of professionals. Be one of the first in your city.
Dotmap is a professional discovery platform. Find talent near you at dotmap.app.
Series
I created a series of blogposts about this app. You can read them here:
Daniel Plomp
I offer hands-on consulting to help you resolve technical challenges and improve your CMS implementations.
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