A resume is an important little document. It summarizes your entire professional and academic career. Resumes are often the document that introduces you to a new company, and remember, first impressions are always important. Creating a resume is not always an easy task, and because I believe that software exists to make things easier, I set on a journey awhile back to make creating resumes easier.
As hackers, software developers and code monkeys, we have a special set of tools. The two most important of these tools, in my opinion, are plain text files and version control systems. But for some reason we ignore these tools when we create our resumes. Instead, we write them in Word documents and PDFs, both of which are not easily editable like plain text is nor easily stored in version control.
I am here to propose an alternative, my resume project. This project started as a way for me to maintain my resume, where after years, I had become tired of having to keep track of a Word document. I often had to recreate the whole thing whenever I gained a new job, or felt like reworking a sentence or two. Now my resume is stored in Markdown, a plain text format that transforms into HTML quite nicely.
The project was initially inspired by LinkedIn and Jekyll. LinkedIn is great, because it is easy to modify and lets you maintain an ongoing career history. But it's still stored somewhere that I can't backup, and it is very hard to revert to an older version (if not impossible). Jekyll is a static blog generator. It is where I fell in love with Markdown and helped me see the benefits to storing all of sites in version control.
I've been pretty happy with what I have produced. My resume now looks quite attractive, and it has gotten me a few job offers. I have been constantly tweaking it as I find better ways to say things. I've had a few people base their resumes off of mine, and one guy changed the project so dramatically, I was actually inspired to make mine even better. If you have a GitHub account, feel free to fork it and change it so you can have your own online resume.