Why I did this to myself

I’ve wanted my resume online for a long time: something I could point people towards easily enough, something that could also be a demonstration of my design skills and facilitate distributing resumes on the go. I figure, without all the social media, this is my best means of networking. Something less static than the InDesign document I’d been using for some decade or so was also a small goal of mine.

Earlier attempts

Over the years I’ve employed many tech stacks to try to do this but never achieved the level of ease or control I was seeking. Raw markup had its benefits and malafits. An SPA would give me an easy way to introduce lots of filtering controls which would have made it easy to print up or link resumes tailored to specific audiences. But what a heavyweight solution.

The biggest problem with identifying a means of solving the problem was actually identifying what success looked like. How was the data stored, how was it retrieved? How was it organized? There are a number of approaches to resumes, and my longest lasting one had been of the chronological variety.

Categorical resume

I decided I wanted a categorical resume. I’ve never settled on a career, more a skill set. I like working in environments where broad knowledge and capacities are necessary. I have lengthy career histories in a number of settings demanding a variety of skills. Highlighting how my different community and professional activities have exposed me to different industries and developed different skills tells a better story about my approach to my career than my titles.

Categories are basically what SSGs do

For a poetry website I had designed I explored Hugo front matter in much more depth. Designing a theme is at least 50% about collecting data. This made me realize Hugo’s generator could be used to create relational data links. Employing these categories also gave me the power to expand on the design: it wasn’t just a document now, it was many documents and each could have a different scope.

It does have a drawback, however: the data model is very brittle! If front matter information is missing from a job or a project page, or even just misspelled, then the whole build fails. At least it is a rapid feedback failure.

More content integration

Having my jobs, education, and on-the-job projects in the same content management system as my articles and personal projects allows me to cross-link the different type of content to connect my professional and hobby lives into something that gives a greater picture of what sorts of problems I work on. I used X language at Y job, and clicking on the tag for X shows that I also wrote two articles about it, used it at Z job, and published an open source project with it.

With professional information cast about a variety of websites, from GitHub to LinkedIn, being able to demonstrate relationships between all this experience improves the coherence of my career and motivations in writing the angry diatribes you’ve come to know and love of my blog.

Designing for printability

As I outlined early, print-readiness was a primary concern for me. I wanted to make sure that there was a version of my resume page designed to look right on paper, not just a screen. In fact, I overemphasized that compared to its screen version but perhaps by the time you’re reading this I have made more strides with it. But not likely. There are far more entertaining problems occupying me than my own vanity! Nevertheless, CSS media queries provide a lot of tools for print layouts. There are still some shortcuts I took (eg, duplicate markup with one hidden on screen and one hidden on paper), but I’m hoping I can make that more efficient soon enough.

It was especially important to be able to design a print version as the amount of information on the web is limited because all of it is links! There is more content available at a click: descriptions of my jobs and projects. That kind of context has to be inlined in a linear document.

a11y

I’m still working on accessibility. The phone view is usable for some things, but there’s almost nothing to aid a screen reader. But this was another reason I wanted it on the web. Passing out a document, either paper or pdf/docx restricts your audience. Being able to view a page on the phone (on the go!), a computer, or using any other tools expands my reach. Why put something on the public internet if you don’t want the maximum amount of people to be able to enjoy it?

Gosh what ego to assume reading my resume might be an enjoyable experience! Although perhaps that could be a guiding principle of the next iteration. Check back in fifteen years!

Well where is it?

Just follow this link! Thanks for looking!