Maintain your resume in Markdown and on GitHub Pages | Hacker News Reader

Maintain your resume in Markdown and on GitHub Pages

pseudoweb.net

52 pointsicco32 comments

The main point of creating his resume with Markdown seems to be the ability to store it in version control, and hold the whole thing in a plain text file. While a resume done in Markdown seems like an interesting idea (and I may end up writing one up just to have a web version of it online), I'd also consider writing one in LaTeX. It's easily storable in version control, and the base file you use to generate the PDF is a plaintext document, which is exactly what he's looking for, and the system is a lot more flexible than Markdown.

As an example, my resume can be found at https://github.com/mdwrigh2/resume/raw/master/mwright-resume... and the source for it can be found at https://github.com/mdwrigh2/resume/blob/master/mwright-resum...

The biggest issue I've found with latex, is its kind of a pain to write in, and has a higher learning curve. In reality, it is the better choice if you want the final product to be printed, or need more stylistic control.

There is a high learning curve associated with it, but this is your resume. When the person is looking at it, they may have no other information on you as of yet, meaning this right here, is your first impression. If I can spend twice the effort on this, and get an "improvement" of 10 or 20% (I'll leave the choice of units of measurement up to the reader...), in my mind that's worth it.

It also doesn't have to be all that difficult. My resume is a style supplied by someone else (it's a pretty standard cv format) with some minor tweaks. Look at the source I linked, and I think you'll agree that it doesn't look all that complicated and probably could be modified with your information, and tweaked here and there to get a fairly unique resume.

> The biggest issue I've found with latex, is its kind of a pain to write in

For a big document certainly, but for a CV or résumé you only need a few very basic things, especially if you're using one of the numerous CV classes available out there (in which case you just follow the original template).

>> The biggest issue I've found with latex, is its kind of a pain to write in

>For a big document certainly

How do you figure? I switched to using LaTeX for all my documents because Word/OpenOffice were such incredible pains for big documents. The only thing that really causes me a bit of complication are tables and embedding pictures. But then again using either of those in the * Office is an order of magnitude more painful or its downright impossible to accomplish what I want...

Yes in the long run latex is superior anyway, but for big documents you have a lot of stuff to learn, so the learning curve is steep. For a CV, you only have to learn (/copy and paste) a few directives and remember to save the file as a .tex.

Agreed, but it is worth it for how nice it looks. As someone who looks at a lot of resumes, I appreciate the ones that are made with LaTex. It shows that little bit of extra effort.

Also, I make the LaTex file I use for my own resume available so that others can copy it. http://edberg.org/jeremy/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.tex

There are numerous examples of using LaTeX for resumes and some templates are available, such as this: http://rpi.edu/dept/arc/training/latex/resumes/

And again, LaTex files are still version control friendly (just as your example indicates), so using which is just a personal taste.

I am still thinking that markdown is better to be used in web context than in printing, even with the help of CSS.

However just a kind reminder, don't put your email address personal phone numbers and residential address as plain text on publicly accessible websites, they are very likely going to be picked up by spammers, etc.

Don't obfuscate email address. It doesn't work and is really annoying. http://jasonpriem.com/2009/05/stop-obfuscating-email/

I favour plain TeX for a resume. LaTeX is based on the principle of writing structured text telling to tell it what you mean, and letting it deal with the presentation. With a resume, it's worth spending extra time doing the presentation yourself.

That said, it does take time to micromanage the presentation. Last time I needed a resume, I was a student and had the time. I don't know what my next resume will be in, or if I'll ever need one again.

LaTeX makes beautiful printed documents, but my experience is that it's more difficult to generate nice HTML. The ideal system would probably do a good job of that as well: how many more people will look at an HTML version rather than a PDF?

I am a user of open source, as such I have created my resume in HTML and PDF.

HTML is the most popular when people visit my website to view my resume and PDF is most popular when people ask me to email my resume to them.

Pandoc [1] does a pretty good job. The issue with HTML is of course that by design it doesn't deal with presentation: that's the job of the presentation layer (i.e. CSS) and the user agent (usually a web browser). PDFs, by contrast, state just how they're meant to look.

[1] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

If you like parentheses, Scribble[1], a tool by the racket guys, does what you're asking for. I haven't used it extensively but the few times I've tried it, it has worked well. Here's an example scribble file[2].

[1]: http://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/index.html [2]: http://git.racket-lang.org/plt/blob/HEAD:/collects/scribblin...

This guy published his LaTeX CV template source, http://jblevins.org/projects/cv-template/.

Just a heads up, there's a typo. Under "Operating Systems", distrobutions -> distributions.

Forked, fixed, pushed, sent pull request. It's hosted on github, why not? :-)

I've used XMLResume for years (using Emacs SGML mode to ensure validity when I edit it, and version control, of course). From the XML, I generate HTML, PDF, and plain text. I'm pretty sure you can even generate a Word doc if you wanted. http://kevin.scaldeferri.com/resume/

I do my resume in good old HTML with microformats incase anyone in the world is parsing those. I really love being able to do a billion hyperlinks incase people are interested in specific things, or need some context.

http://paultarjan.com/resume

I use git on the server.

Your projects page is interesting http://paulisageek.com/ppp/ I've never seen so many facebook like buttons in row like that. I like it.

"Created a window manager on top of DOS, written entirely in C, using a Linear Frame Buffer. Responsible for creating all the interrupt handlers (mouse, microphone, timer)."

My hat is off to you, good sir.

I know this article isn't about the content of your resume, but is your experience as a BSA camp counselor relevant programming or design work?

Very few employers will understand that being Nature Director likely meant you were an Environmental Science counselor and that that badge was one of the more difficult interesting ones likely offered at the camp. Are there benefits to signaling that you are part of a large organization like Scouting or a similar (generally) well regarded national organization like this? is it worth mentioning on the off chance your employer was also a Boy Scout?

What do other people think, is there a good general rule for where to stop including older work experience?

If you're putting one resume online and you can't tailor it to one job you're applying for, do you tailor it for the job you wish you had? What do you do differently for your general resume?

So funny enough, at my last two interviews, both of my interviewers were ex-Boy Scouts. It's a job I can talk a lot about and since I did it for four years, really affected the kind of worker I am.

I suppose that's one way it might go. Another is running into someone who is informed about the BSA's legal discrimination against atheists and gays. So some may see it and think of your character being "Christian bigot". Unlikely, I think. It may have no effect, but I think it's worth consideration.

I screen lots of resumes in hiring game programmers. Personally, it wouldn't bother me. Then again, it wouldn't help you either, because I need to know about your skills and experience. I'll figure out if you're an a-hole or a nice guy / team player on the phone, and finally in-person.

I hire people, not "programmers", or "managers", or "administrative assistants". From my perspective as an employer, his BSA experience is relevant to any job. I'm very interested in aspects of my employees' personalities as well as their specific job-related performance. Listing his BSA experience reflects his values and experiences outside of work. These are the things that shape who we are, and I want to know who I'm hiring.

One of the most frequent experiences I have with potential employers is writing my resume in HTML or LaTeX, only to have their HR accept only .doc documents.

How do you guys get around this?

don't apply to places that require .doc.

I agree. If HR won't even accept PDFs that's a very bad sign!

I've had resumes in a variety of formats, but even in 2010 companies and recruitment agencies will often only accept them in Microsoft Word format.

Using version control seems quite logical though, so if you want to produce a resume which emphasises a particular skill that could be a separate branch, and so on.

In my opinion the ultimate format for a resume is xml with css styling, such that the presentation can be altered as desired or conform to some standardised layout, but it seems that the job market is just not ready for that degree of sophistication yet. Is there a standard xml document type for resumes? If there isn't someone should invent one.

There are a number of xml formats for resume. You can find few of them at http://microformats.org/wiki/resume-formats .

Having xml, markdown, textile or xhtml with microformat extesions format as a base is not stopping you from sending hr companies doc or pdf generated document. There are some tools and libraries for this task.

do you _really_ want to work for those companies, though?

here is a free site to host your resume - hirednext.com. you can change the resume design on the fly and update it as easily.

... and at the same time you can be included in every employer search every time and receive job offers.

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