The Overengineered Resume with Zola, JSON Resume, Weasyprint, and Nix (2023)

I have a resume in latex, all I have to do is change a couple lines every now and then and run the default latex pipeline, all of it directly from gitlab. It worked on the first time I tried and every time since then, it produces a pdf which I can then download and send.

I noticed the container they run uses nix too, which is nice although I don't care about it as long as it works. I could add signing of the pdf maybe some day for fun. What's great with this approach is how little hassle there is and nothing to install, nowhere, and produces the same clean resume I've used for over a decade (but needed to install a thousand things I could never remember from one computer to another).

I wish there was a standard format for resume that was universally used. Every HR website requires you to upload a resume to apply, then tries to extract the various experiences and details automatically, invariably fucks it up completely, and you end up having to spend 20 minutes to correct it manually. Unless they treat this exercise as a form of captcha…

I did something similar but with my phone, the android orgzly app, termux, jinja2 and latex.

I cribbed a CV template from overleaf and put some jinja2 in it to take the content from CV note in my note taking app: https://hitchdev.com/orji/using/latex-cv/

With termux I can then hit a button to run a script and it will instantly generate a pretty PDF using latex from an orgzly note and fire off an android share intent.

The nice thing about this set up was that if a recruiter called me while I was out and wanted a CV quickly with a couple of tweaks made I could just do it on my note taking app and email an updated PDF in a few seconds.

In theory I could easily change the style of the CV but in practice I haven't felt the need to touch it in years.

It is definitely overengineered and, unfortunately, outdated, as the most recent position in the resume and about page do not match. A lot of effort for something that is not accurate and obviously not used to apply for jobs, which is the purpose of a resume in most cases.

A simple file (Word doc, Numbers, Google Doc) that receives a change every few years and is exported as a PDF seems to do the task better.

EU has the Europass, I just use that.