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Comment by _andychung | Hacker News Reader

I started read.cv when transitioning from full time to freelance design in July. I wanted an easy to update 'about me' page to link from my website and bio – something simpler than LinkedIn and more dynamic than a PDF.

Design wise I focused on legibility and tried to give projects/side projects equal weight to things like education and work experience. A few unique features: tagging collaborators in your experiences, status updates, and print optimized profiles.

It took me around three months (Sept to November) to get it out the door, and I've been working on making improvements since. Open to any questions or feedback!

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> Design wise I focused on legibility and tried to give projects/side projects equal weight to things like education and work experience. A few unique features: tagging collaborators in your experiences, status updates, and print optimized profiles.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I think your definition of legibility is maybe a bit off, the font is too small to be considered legible by any accessibility standard. I have 20/20 vision but I struggle to read some of it. The color contrast is also failing in some cases, and since the font is so small and thin, the contrast needs to be increased above what color contrast would suggest.

Also, when I wanted to check the size of the font (which is set at 14px but that seems equivalent to 11-12px for the common fonts like Arial) I realized I can't actually select any of the text, which I think might be important a website like this. You are creating some mask with a different div that might be blocking the clicks. You can create a mask like that with simpler html and css that won't have a problem with clicks.

Otherwise it's a nice project and it looks like you got a good traction already. I hope this helps.

Right, so I read a bit further and saw a comment about the view example button, which took me to the proper cv. So my comment isn't completely accurate, haha.

1. As others have pointed out, the default font size is way, way too small. Not readable on a phone, barely on a computer monitor.

2. Please try your site on an oldish iPhone, like an iPhone 7, in landscape mode. You give about 2cm of space for the scrolling content. The problem seems to be keeping the "View example" button anchored on the bottom of the screen at all times, with a large fixed border around the button. This leaves no room for the actual content. When you actually click "View example," the resulting page renders fine on a landscape iPhone.

3. Please try your site on a large 27" monitor in full screen mode. Your content's width is a fixed number of pixels and you end up rendered on a tiny sliver (about 1/5) centered horizontally on the screen. Please don't be one of those sites that has huge horizontal whitespace margins (I'm looking at you, John Gruber). It's a terrible web trope. Consider using the whole width of the browser window, or most of it.

4. I also agree that headshot photos should not be part of this product. Dare to be actually different from LinkedIn.

Please post here again after some iteration, this thing has promise.

Hey Andy, good job! The app looks really clean and nice to navigate through.

I just wanted to share a couple of "views" that I created to express my career in a different way. I'm sharing just for your inspiration. (content in Portuguese, but I bet you can auto translate it)

Experience view; years of experience per theme/subject. https://rodolphoarruda.pro.br/experiencia/

Projects & cultural context in chronological order (notice the flags) https://rodolphoarruda.pro.br/eu/lista-de-projetos/

I decided to make those views available because I stopped believing the standard CV/LinkedIn format for presenting myself and my career.

Cheers and keep up the great work!

Cool this is super helpful, thank you!

How was the experience with setting up a Cape Verde business entity for the domain? Any issues or regrets?

I guess you simply purchase the domain. Just like bit.ly which, as far as I know, doesn't have an entity in Libya.

Different domain locations have different rules. For example, if you want to get a .sg domain, you need a Singapore entity. If you want a .aero domain, you need to show you're an aerospace business to the registrar.

I tried doing it through 101domain.com and couldn't because I didn't have a registered business in Cape Verde. I tried again using Marcaria.com and they handled the registration process and I haven't had any issues so far.

Are you sure about that? Appears to me that you need a registered trademark in Cape Verde, which Marcaria also has a process for (costs a lot and takes up to a year). I'm fairly certain your domain will expire within three months after purchase without a valid trademark certificate.

Love it. I see you're not running ads. What's your plan for monetization?

I would love to be able to embed the CV into a personal page so that it could link to the full profile on your site. I could picture it being the perfect link between a social network and private content.

Hey Andy, I never received the verification email. je at h4x.club

Check your junk. That is where mine ended up.

Ha, thanks. Went past spam and straight to trash for some reason. First time I've seen that from a signup.

Welp, sorry about that. Wonder if the .cv tld makes has anything to do with this...

What are you using for your email backend?

The authentication emails are sent by Firebase.

If this does grow, it might be worth getting another domain just for email purposes such as "read-cv-email.com".

Hey looks great! What stack have you used? In particularly how did you develop such clean UI?

I just want to say this is a fantastic idea, and as another commenter said, it would be great to eat linkedin's lunch.

My only feedback I guess would be to make same wish I make about just about any project these days, which is compatibility with activitypub. Do you have thoughts on the promise of a project like this to work on that kind of protocol?

Well done. I'm going to use it.

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