(c) Copyright 2023 Andrew J. Peterson. All Rights Reserved.
Like anyone, my resume has evolved throughout my life. Orignially, it was a manually-typed page, and then with the micro-computer revolution, a computerized MSWord document. Nerding out in the 1990s, it became an XML document multiple XSLT transforms. Finally, perhaps exhausted by the whole thing, a fell back to a PDF dump of my LinkedIn page.
LinkedIn is great and all, but their normal (free) resume output is clunky. Ideally a resume tool should help create a one-page summary, customized for specific opportunities. (I'm not solving this!) My LinkedIn "everything" resume I flooded people with did only one thing: giving people the impression that "I'd done lots of stuff". I got by with this, but it likely isn't the right answer for most jobs. Looking back, this "resume" solution was not the quality I usually aim for. And, perhaps too much emotional insight: I was letting my occassional scorn for the recruiting process get in my own way. This repo represents an attempt to rectify that, and provide a better ending for this story.
I decided to create a new resume, hand-crafted like my first resume. I wanted to keep the project as low-tech as possible. I would create a clean HTML document, style it with CSS, and be done. Yeah, I had some cool ideas, like an organic-shaped timeline, where my experiences were connected along a meandering path, representing my professional journey. I tried to develop this idea, but the more I did, the more I realized that the visual design would be a challenging-- too challenging for me to gracefully execute. I like the meandering shape, so I've kept it as a watermark, but I have reduced the scope of the idea, and this is a simplify version.
In my final polish, I was trying out numerous color schemes. After switching back between CSS file and browser repeatedly, I decided to make a little interactive tool to let me do this. So there is a little itsy-bitsy bit of Javascript. And then I added one more that let me customize wording for different target audiences. But it is, fundamentally, the low-tech resume I wanted.
Contact me, and I'll send you a PDF!
To see it locally,
- check out the code
- run some sort of local server (or don't)
- look at
index.html - to make a PDF, just make sure page margins are set to 0, and it should just work.
Stuff that is not essential, but I stick here for reference.
I generated the curve at https://app.haikei.app/
I'm using the fonts: Lora + Nunito. Lora is the standard for my web sites, but it is quite heavy in the italic version, so I pulled in Nunito as a secondary font. Suggestion comes from https://www.figma.com/google-fonts/lora-font-pairings/#:~:text=Lora%20is%20a%20well%20balanced,%2C%20Ubuntu%2C%20Alegreya%20and%20Nunito.
I added the color schemes to be directly configurable. Interesting ones:
- HP Calculator
- Tan
- Purple
- [http://127.0.0.1:3000/#river=#4f0e03;riverside=#531002;land=#581102;header=#e07ca0;tagline=#a36d3e;contacts=#f285ad;sections=#a66f3f;text=#a69c95;skills=#a69c95]
- [http://127.0.0.1:3000/#river=#6d2417;riverside=#641b0c;land=#530f02;header=#e07ca0;tagline=#a36d3e;contacts=#f285ad;sections=#a66f3f;text=#a69c95;skills=#a69c95]
- Orange with pink accents
- Burnin' Neon
- Squishy Jellyfish