I created and update my resume on GitHub. This is not a normal way but works well for me.
[edited]
I use GitHub to save and share my Git repositories, so I assume GitHub as default git repository service in this article. If you are familiar with other version management system or git repo service, please read "Git / GitHub" to any other words, like "Git / Gitlab", "Mercurial / Bitbucket", etc.
Based on the twitter discussion.
[/edited]
Why I uploaded my resume to GitHub
I have an account of LinkedIn. LinkedIn was an unique service for making public individual resume, and communicating with others online. I like the idea, so I always make my resume public.
When I applied to a company, it is required to make an A4 resume, typically created with Microsoft word or something. I used Linux Laptop (powered by Arch Linux) at that time, so I did not have Microsoft office. I could use Google Document, but it did not allow me to use various shortcuts, and was hard to edit during offline. Thus I decided to create my resume with HTML, CSS, and Webpack.
It seems that creating my resume with that stack is even easier, interesting, and cheaper than getting Windows machine or installing MS Office to my Linux Laptop.
When I create something, I always run git init and control the versions with Git and upload to GitHub. This is for backup, because I sometimes fully uninstall Linux OS for some accidents. So I upload my HTML-based resume to GitHub.
I do not care if my personal information is open to the public.
I found that managing my resume with Git brings me a lot of benefit, so I will introduce them here.
1. Portability
I can show and edit my resume everywhere. From my MacBook, Linux Laptop, even someone's PC. My GitHub resume url is so short as to type directly in a web browser's url window.
https://github.com/acro5piano/resume
In fact, I have typed the url with someone's PC. I prefer this way to send the PDF to someone via Facebook Messenger or something.
2. Receiving Pull Request
I did not expect this feature at first, but really easy to brush up my resume.
I have asked my friend, great Polish developer, to check my resume before applying to a company, I sent him to the URL. He saw my repository and corrected my mistakes and created Pull Request. He refactored my resume! I check the difference and merged the PR. Really great experience.
3. Easier to design
I can customize my resume layout with my knowledge of CSS. It looked easier than customizing it with MS Word. I could not even implement flex-box like vertical layout.
I can use Sketch to customize design, but Sketch is not for writing, though it is great tool for creating design prototype.
4. Less management cost
With Git, I can ensure this resume is definitely new one. When I created with MS Word, I had multiple versions, like
- resume-kaz-gosho.docx
- resume-kaz-gosho__updated.docx
- resume-kaz-gosho__2018-04-28.docx
- resume-kaz-gosho (1).docx
I could not trust which is the newest one.
We can even show difference between versions with git log -p.
5. Stack free
I can use any text editor to edit my resume. This is a really good point for developers, because developers tend to favorite a specific text editor. For example, I am not good at the interface of MS Word, because it does not guarantee layout (and missing "mode" concept... unlike Vim).
I can export .docx to .pdf with MS Word, but it requires at least three clicks, which is not comfortable for developers. If we use HTML and webpack-dev-server, we can convert HTML to PDF with one-liner, like:
chromium --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf --window-size=1200,1900 http://localhost:3000/
Or use conversion tools such as wkhtmltopdf.
Of course, we can add that command to NPM script:
"build": "chromium --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf --window-size=1200,1900 http://localhost:3000/"
Then run
yarn build
which is really short. Headless Chrome is really awesome. Furthermore, we do not have to run that command if we properly set up CI.
Todo
I would like to go further with HTML-based resume. Currently my big todos are:
- CI. Hopefully, hook
git pushtomasterbranch and generate PDF file and take screenshot, then save them to somewhere (maybe S3). - I18n. Two languages
enandjaare required. - Web Page. Paradoxically, I do not have web page of my resume. Maybe I use React.js for rendering.
Conclusion
I will continue to keep my resume on GitHub. If you are interested, please try it!
(...At your own risk, because CV has some sensitive data)
Top comments (75)
I personally use markdown to represent my resume on GitHub.
github.com/stephencorwin/resume/bl...
This lets me also declare it as a dependency on my portfolio website. Leveraging
react-markdown, I can output the latest version of my resume on each deployment automatically.github.com/stephencorwin/stephenco...
Live:
stephencorwin.me/resume
It's been working out great for me so far. Glad to see others taking a similar approach.
Thank you for sharing your approach, Stephen.
Markdown is more declarative, maintainable, and elegant way! And you create your own website with interactive user interface with React. You also have your portfolio in it, deploy script and linter. They are what I have to do build as my current goal.
I got great inspiration from your repository. Thanks again!
Thanks! When I was rebuilding it, I never did finished fleshing out the content of my portfolio -- it's a bit stale (4+ years old). I suppose that it is a side effect of no longer searching. Less motivation to update it once you have landed the job. ;)
Feel free to reach out if you have questions. GL on your job search!
Yeah exactly. However, it is even easy for me to update the resume via Git (and hopefully CI).
Thank you very much!
The resume is maintained via GitHub, but also published on npm. Whenever I make an update I can just bump the version number and
npm publish. If the portfolio website is using@lastestin the package.json, redeploying should grab the latest version. You can also just run the commandnpm i --save @stephencorwin/resume@latestto force an update to the latest.Oh, you publish your resume to NPM! I have never imagined it. I have just installed your latest resume on my PC :)
Why do you publish this to NPM?
It's scoped under my tag
@stephencorwinso as to not be confused with others. Part of the reason to use both is so that we can have "source of truth" files that we generate other files from. We don't necessarily want to always publish the generated files on GitHub, but it does make sense to publish them on npm since the audience there intends to use them in projects.Mainly though... It's because I use Zeit Now to host my projects and they do not recognize any "change" when deploying unless I either dockerize the container or version bump the dependency in my package.json.
This is in part due to aggressive caching.
Please note that you can use a GitHub repo directly as a dependency in your package.json though.
"@stephencorwin/resume": "git://github.com/stephencorwin/resume"github.com/stephencorwin/stephenco...
Got it! Nice hack.
Hey, nice resume. Small world, we were at UA for an overlapping time as contractors. I think I vaguely recall seeing you around on Slack or GitHub or something. :)
Lol. Yea, for sure. The interwebs are smaller than we think. :P
Nice!
However I don't think I'll use this approach myself since sometimes, when applying for different jobs, you might want to send out different versions of your cv, emphasizing different skills. And I wouldn't necessarily want all of this to be public ...
Thank you for your comment, shairay.
Yeah, we exactly should do this.
Personally I have never created different versions for different jobs (so I failed to get a job, haha), your opinion bring me other point of view.
Maybe we can create different branches or tags on Git and manage multiple versions for jobs we apply. Basic information would not change so much, and we can update
masterbranch and merge to each branches if some breaking change happened. Thus I think this approach also works in this way :)I know how you feel. We should not make our personal information public. In that case private repository may work, but you do not have to do this paying additional cost!
What I meant is that the rationale of "personalizing" your cv per application also means that you might not be interested in the company you are applying to seeing exactly what changes you made.
Remember, this is your information, and you should exercise care in what you reveal and to whom!
LaTeX & git branches all the way and of course private GitHub project.
resume-kaz-gosho.docx
resume-kaz-gosho_updated.docx
resume-kaz-gosho_2018-04-28.docx
resume-kaz-gosho (1).docx
Hahah,
This was one of the primary reasons for me to move from doc/pdf to GitHub resume.
pratikaambani.github.io
Development in progress....
Thank you for your response, Pratik!
Yeah, we can manage a lot of versions of resume with Git.
By the way, I visited the link and found
Java J2EE Developer, which may make your resume stand out focusing on the specific position. Thanks!Cheers!! :)
Kaz, that's badass! bravo. I like the layout & color scheme and I agree it is an easy way to keep things up to date.
For me with consulting, I have new projects to add a few times per year, so this would be idea. Bookmarked!
Thank you for your reply, Sean!
Great, you can easily add new projects to your resume only with your favorite text editor!
emacs! LOL
Actually lately I've been using sublime text more and more.
I think Emacs is a great editor :) Everything will go with Emacs Lisp!
🙏Amen!🙏
I do the same, except I wrote the whole thing in HTML / CSS and host it in a sub-folder of my Github Pages site. No hosting / deployment overhead...
janvt.io/cv/
github.com/janvt/janvt.github.io
Thank you for the comment.
I have tried that simple approach, but I switched to hosting in Netlify.
The reason is that if we add some build process (like compiling jsx, compress & uglify assets, etc...), we have to commit these files to git.
I always use
webpackor something to bundle my code, so hosting service is necessary for me...But Netliy makes the deployment process quite easy!
For i18n, you could consider a library for that like github.com/fnando/i18n-js and, during build time, create a static rendered html version for each language, just like you do with pdf version.
I personally decided to create a custom CMS-based solution because that can showcase my development skills on Github, such as backend development, some frontend, testing, etc, and still have an easy way to change data without having to create commits, PRs, etc on github. I was often letting changes to pile up before updating my website. I plan to have a printable version of the website, where instead of downloading a PDF version from it, you can just print the CV from any browser.
My code is in github.com/gmmcal/gmmcal.com.br
Thank you for your information!
Your website looks really cool!
As you pointed out, we can show our server-side skills as well as frontend skills, if we create our resume with CSM.
Some recruiters still demands PDF. Actually I don't maintain it recently, but when I start to look for jobs again, I will write some scripts to generate multi-language PDF.
Maybe I will use puppeteer now.
I liked a lot the idea of using chrome headless for PDF generation. When I get to the point of having a printable version of the website, I'll try to use that approach instead of uploading one to CMS :)
Love this article, I have a Github resume for most of the same reasons you listed.
For me though I originally made my resume in LateX so I host my
.texsource in the repo. I now have Travis CI set up to build the pdf and post it on my personal website.You can check it out here
Thank you for the comment, Evan!
I am glad to know you take similar approach.
Great feature, CI saves a lot of time of us. I feel I should set up my CI environment ASAP. LateX seems to work well to structure documents!
Thank you for your comment Matteo and Erildo.
First, I think Dev.to is a community for all developers, so it seems natural that Matteo replied to Erildo's comment. Hopefully Anyone can join other's thread because Dev.to is open community :)
As Matteo said instead of me, we can still have a public URL of our resume if we build some CI system. Although this approach takes a little time and cost depending on which service we use, it may be not a matter if we have skills or passion to create automated work flow. Even if we do not prepare automated build system, we can get the benefit of ascii data version management and one liner NPM script.
If you do not spend a lot of time in GitHub, I am sorry that I assume almost all developers use Git and GitHub heavily.
Dear Kaz, you can use atbox.io to make easy html5 resume
Thank you for sharing atbox.io, Sadra!
I created my account there. Waiting for those hiring!
you're welcome my friend ❤️
you're welcome dear Kaz 😍🙏
Thank you for your comment, Victor!
I am glad that you like the way ;)
We can update our resume without worrying about which is the newest version. And customize resume for certain companies by branching out!