Show HN: A better résumé for developers and designers
makerslate.io
makerslate.io
This began with my desire to create a simple, responsive, nicely designed résumé for myself that is completely focused on projects, skills, and searchability. I started by looking at templates and other pre-built options, but they all seemed too busy, too noisy, or somehow not quite right.
As I started designing what I thought the ideal résumé would be for me, I decided that a lot of others might be in a similar position and would possibly find a tool like this useful. So what started as a résumé for myself turned into a full-fledged side project: a résumé optimized for all digital makers.
I've also been doing research on the hiring process, and the overarching importance of results and execution is a theme that comes up again and again from people who make those decisions. So why not give them exactly what they're looking for?
It's still very much an MVP, but I have a lot of ideas for interesting directions to go in if it catches on. I'd love to get feedback from anyone who wants to give it a try.
Pretty impressive work, and brilliant idea. I hope you're aiming at keeping it free and as a nice portfolio project. I would be very careful with turning this kind of website -free/pre-mium too early. And besides it, it's a brilliant portfolio project actually.
Coming up feedbacks, but first I'd like to say again that I really appreciate your work here, it's a great start !
Based on the quick test I made: https://makerslate.io/mathias-sauvestre - First thing that annoys me is inside the skill, the non respect of the typo when in edit mode and how it's displayed. For instance, as a iOS developer, I look dumb in my resume if I write "Ios" (uppercase i). Same with AVFoundation or AFNetworking, those are frameworks that look retarted written capitalized :D (also more mainstream tech @ HTML and CSS should stay uppercase imho) - The picture I uploaded was brutally cut afterwards, even if I extend the details of the project. This is probably just something small to fix. I think there are smarter ways here to handle the images. I don't want it to be cropped even in "small mode". - The skill bar can become very quickly crowded. I don't know how that could look like, but I'd probably prefer something with "weights" attached to skills. I give a weight to a skill depending on how heavy the project was on that tech/skill, and the display makes those skills/tech that had biggest weights shine out. Again, design wise, I don't know if that's possible to execute while keeping the design clean (and that's a BIG requirement, which I agree with). - I might want to edit my title. It's written Developer here, but I'm also Founder, and that's a massive part of my job and skillset, I'd regret if I can't put that in highlight. - Was just mentioned as a comment while writing, but, I'm not 100% sure with the search bar. It brings something design wise, I can see that, but UX wise seems pretty useless to me (I'd still keep it for design purposes though :D) - I might want to add badges or create fake milestones that would look good for the projects to decorate them. Elegantly and by keeping it very sober, but something that give weights to them (this last comment is DEFINITIVELY more subjective, and if you go in that direction, you end up building something complex, but could be still an interesting idea).
The rest I like. Fonts are very good, design is clean, sober, elegant, great work.
If you need some help on the web dev side, I'd be happy to contribute freely. Just shoot me a message on Twitter, it's my real one on the test page I quoted.
Best of luck with this project, I hope you'll find time to continue. Great start anyway.
Mathias Sauvestre Founder & iOS Lead Dev at Hyper
Yeah, I'm not in any rush to try to monetize it. My main goal was just to try to make something useful to a lot of people, get some practice at marketing and promotion, and have a nice portfolio piece for myself as you say.
On your feedback:
- I definitely agree about skills and capitalization patterns. I wanted to encourage a more humanized and 'formal' looking approach vs. something like all lowercase or the stack overflow hyphenated approach, but it's impossible to come up with a general rule that covers every convention. I may start manually specifying some of the common ones--will have to think about it a bit more.
- Agree about there being better ways to display the images when the project is expanded. When collapsed is trickier--I fiddled with it a lot and it's hard to have everything looking smooth and uniform without cropping since you can have images with such radically different dimensions. Did you realize you can click the image to zoom in to a full screen view? I may have to make that more obvious.
- Also agree about the crowding of the skills. I've been pondering how to best handle this while keeping it simple.
- On titles, I'll probably start to open those up soon as I've also been getting some interest from visual artists, photographers, and other folks. I wanted to begin with a focused niche, but I don't see much reason to exclude people who would find it useful since the platform could work just as well for them.
- Yeah, I'm a bit wary about badges, milestones, and the like, since I really want to preserve the minimalist approach, but I'll keep an open mind :)
I appreciate your offer to help and I'd be happy to keep in touch.