Comment by sitetechie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sitetechie | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you for your brutal honesty, I really appreciate it. Regarding some your points:

2. How's the layout broken? I'm on Firefox on Windows XP as well, and regarding fonts, this was one of the few Google fonts that actually rendered nicely on my screens in different browsers. Some are utter crap, I really thought I had found one that isn't. Maybe specifying absolute font sizes would fix things.

5. Ouch. Although I'm not sure the layout is completely broken, the graphics could use some more TLC. The 'full stack' image is supposed to convey some mosaic-like design (with the shades of grey) instead of a 'clean' version, but I'm aware a failed miserably in this regard. Will redo the image.

7. No problem.

> I am left with the impression of a Jack of all trades but master of none.

I prefer to think of myself as a specializing generalist, see http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/generalizingSpecialists....

> you don't necessarily have much depth behind any of the technologies

I figured the industry experience covered some of this

> You're a UX designer, but your CV isn't optimised for scannability at all.

Well, I've played the role of UX designer, not the same thing. I focused more on story-telling than scannability here, good suggestion though.

> you're using a static background image .. instead of gracefully degrading CSS3 > you've failed basic cross-browser compatibility > polishing up my front-end skills to get the design into shape

Good points, thanks. Please consider this version 0.1.

> how to organise your content for the way real people are going to read that CV

If by 'real people' you mean recruiters, that's not my primary target audience, I have an utterly boring, scannable MS-Word document for them if needed. Also, the page doubles as an 'about me' page for peterdevos.com and my resume, this may have been a bad decision to begin with.

> rookie mistakes in the design and lack of scannability are letting you down right now

Agree to some extent. That's what this 'Show HN' post was for, to get initial feedback. Again, thank you, much appreciated.

Here's a screenshot taken with the latest dev version of Chrome on Windows 7: http://i.imgur.com/aciAY.jpg

I assume the layout breaks on my setup because I have set the default browser font size to 18px and you're using em's (which are relative to the base font) to define all your font sizes.

Using relative font sizing isn't necessarily bad, but you should make sure that the whole layout is flexible enough. For example, you have set a static pixel height for the speech bubble and "full stack" containers. With a slightly different font setup that can cause the text to overflow (as can be seen in the screenshot above).

Great work this far, I'll bet you can make this a lot better by reading all the feedback in these comments.

Yup, using ems for the body font is the problem here, rookie mistake for sure. Thanks for pointing it out, should be fixed now.

I assume the layout breaks on my setup because I have set the default browser font size to 18px

FWIW, that's the same problem I was seeing at the top, and I too have my default font size at 18px.

I also see areas overlapping badly alongside the full stack graphic, which apparently you don't in Chrome.

How's the layout broken?

For 2 and 5, I'm guessing it's the same issue that juriga mentioned, as I also have my default font size a little larger. I see the same effect as in juriga's screenshot at the top, and in Firefox I also see a lot of overlapping text in the area alongside the full stack graphic. My defaults are font size 18px, monospace 16px, minimum 10px; maybe that will help you to reproduce the problem.

As for the graphic itself and the accompanying text, as with much of the document, I think the idea could probably work but I'm not wild about the current execution. I won't repeat things others have already said in detail, but FWIW I agree with the people who have suggested that the graphics lack a common visual style and the text sizes lack a clear hierarchy.

I figured the industry experience covered some of this

Yes and no. If it's me, and maybe I've got past the initial scan and now I'm looking for more details to prepare for an interview, I'd like at least a rough idea of your level with any relevant skills you're claiming. That means, broadly speaking, how much experience in total and how recently you used that skill.

A list of buzzwords and a list of projects but no matching between them doesn't tell me which are your relatively strong skills. Unfortunately, I'm going to assume by default that none of them are particularly strong, simply because in my experience most people who list lots of skills on a CV/resume but don't highlight their particular strengths among those skills usually aren't very strong at anything.

If you do have relatively strong areas, particularly those that are relevant to specific job, then failing to highlight them means at best you're missing a chance to direct the interview in a way that is going to make you look good. At worst, you're going to get asked about your weaker skills and if you get caught out on the technical questions/programming test/whatever the interviewers are going to assume your other skills are all of that level.

If by 'real people' you mean recruiters, that's not my primary target audience, I have an utterly boring, scannable MS-Word document for them if needed.

I guess in that case my question is: who is your primary target audience for this document? If it's technical/management guys who are going to be conducting an interview once you're past the recruiters, I'd still say scannability is essential. It's totally unfair that people who are going to make decisions that could have a major effect on your life aren't necessarily going to read the whole document you've spent so much time and care preparing, but in the real world, that's often going to be the case, so you might as well play by the same rules as everyone else!

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