The application list shows the oldest applications first

The whole point of a job application tracker's dashboard is "what's happening with my job search right now" -- the applications a user is actively waiting to hear back on need to be easy to find. Right now GET /api/applications/ returns the user's oldest application first and their newest one last, so for anyone with more than a page's worth of applications, the thing they care about most is buried at the bottom (or on a later page) while stale applications from months ago sit at the top forever. Users will reasonably conclude the app "isn't tracking their new application" when it's actually right there -- just at the end of the list.

Application.Meta.ordering is set to ["created_at"]. Django's ordering syntax treats a bare field name as ascending order and a "-"-prefixed field name as descending order, so ["created_at"] sorts oldest first instead of newest first.

python manage.py shell -c " from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model from applications.models import Application u = get_user_model().objects.create_user(username='t2demo', password='pw-t2demo-123') Application.objects.create(user=u, company='Old Co', role='Engineer') Application.objects.create(user=u, company='New Co', role='Engineer') from rest_framework.test import APIClient c = APIClient(); c.force_authenticate(user=u) r = c.get('/api/applications/') print([row['company'] for row in r.data['results']]) "

-> ['Old Co', 'New Co'] (oldest first -- should be ['New Co', 'Old Co'])

Meta.ordering is the default ordering applied whenever no explicit .order_by() overrides it -- exactly what ApplicationViewSet relies on, since it never calls .order_by() itself. A one-character typo here (a missing "-") silently reverses the sort direction for every consumer of this queryset, with no error anywhere: the query is still perfectly valid SQL, it's just sorting the wrong way.

Compare applications/models.py's Meta.ordering against Django's ordering syntax (a leading "-" means descending) and against what the README's API walkthrough implies about "most recent first."