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

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

#91
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to see a really good LaTeX CV. I guess it is possible but in my experience LaTeX just isn't designed for that and gives boring-looking results.

I have yet to see an impressive resume from someone that wasn't boring in layout. Worse, I have seen very few resumes that were not boring in looks that were attached to a good candidate. :(

> I have seen very few resumes that were not boring in looks that were attached to a good candidate

I have seen many. You might be misinterpreting "boring". I don't mean that CVs should be like a Flash website. I mean they should look good typographically and not just like an instruction manual for a washing machine.

I wish I'd saved some of the best ones, but take a look at some of these: https://www.beamjobs.com/resumes/programmer-resume-examples

Ignoring the content, they are almost all far superior typographically to the example in this article.

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

#92
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to see an impressive resume from someone that wasn't boring in layout. Worse, I have seen very few resumes that were not boring in looks that were attached to a good candidate. :(

> I have seen very few resumes that were not boring in looks that were attached to a good candidate I have seen many. You might be misinterpreting "boring". I don't mean that CVs should be like a Flash website. I mean they should look good typographically and not just like an instruction manual for a washing machine. I wish I'd saved some of the best ones, but take a look at some of these: https://www.beamjobs.com/re…

I'm somewhat cheating in what I mean here, though. I was thinking of stuff like https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.html, where his CV is so basic in layout that it is kind of shocking. If I remember the CV of most high level faculty I got the chance to look at, none of them were that concerned with columns or typeface. They were, simply, lists of data.

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

#93
I love me an overengineered resume. I've been hacking on my academic cv as part of my personal website for years and years, with unholy stuff like live TeX libraries downloaded in the midst of a netlify CI process. Still needs some work on various formatting edge cases, but in case you're curious: https://github.com/paultopia/websiterevision2017

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

#94
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have seen very few resumes that were not boring in looks that were attached to a good candidate I have seen many. You might be misinterpreting "boring". I don't mean that CVs should be like a Flash website. I mean they should look good typographically and not just like an instruction manual for a washing machine. I wish I'd saved some of the best ones, but take a look at some of these: https://www.beamjobs.com/re…

I'm somewhat cheating in what I mean here, though. I was thinking of stuff like https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.html , where his CV is so basic in layout that it is kind of shocking. If I remember the CV of most high level faculty I got the chance to look at, none of them were that concerned with columns or typeface. They were, simply, lists of data.

It's a bit different in academia, especially if you are Donald Knuth! When do you think was the last time he sent a CV to a company looking for a job? The 60s?

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

#95
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm somewhat cheating in what I mean here, though. I was thinking of stuff like https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.html , where his CV is so basic in layout that it is kind of shocking. If I remember the CV of most high level faculty I got the chance to look at, none of them were that concerned with columns or typeface. They were, simply, lists of data.

It's a bit different in academia, especially if you are Donald Knuth! When do you think was the last time he sent a CV to a company looking for a job? The 60s?

Again, I know I'm cheating to pull his out. I don't have any links to any of the profs I worked near in the past.

I have grown rather convinced more people just go by whatever is in LinkedIn than I'm comfortable with.

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

#96
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be careful with LaTeX. I use to have a LaTeX resume generated with LuaTeX. At an old company, I saw my LaTeX resume in the ATS long after I was hired. Apparently, something happened and the PDF displayed as blurred-but-not-unreadable in the ATS. Maybe the ATS did some post-processing or used a limited PDF display engine? Lucky for me, the resume for that job was just a formality. These days, I just use Google…

I've made sure all the most commonly used ATS systems can read the produced PDF without issue.

Do you have any tips, code, or even just a list of the common ATS systems? I need to do this with my latex cv but I'm not even sure where to start.

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

#97
post #85

I don't know that this is the right way to solve the resume 'problem' - I think LaTeX is a far superior choice, yet the author pretty much dimissed it as a possibility. For me personally, I found LaTeX to be the perfect solution. I have my resume tex setup so I can set toggles to define what gets output. E.g. applying for a manager position, I might keep it brief and more technical. The resume is modular and can be u…

> I think LaTeX is a far superior choice, yet the author pretty much dimissed it as a possibility. Learning curve is a thing: I've never touched LaTeX, and I don't anticipate using it in the future. If I wanted to automate a thing as a learning project, I probably would rule out LaTeX unless I had a reason to want to learn it.

You can also use HTML+CSS and print to PDF.

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

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix is completely orthogonal to whatever tech you use to build the resume - it's nice as a build tool + to provide dev environments for however you're going to realize your resume.

There is no reason to mention it, though. It's like mentioned Ubuntu as being necessary for having made a resume.

Nix ≠ NixOS. Nix is a build tool (like make or Ninja or Bazel) with strict isolation of builds and caching of artifacts. NixOS is a distro built on top of that tool, like the BSDs are built on top of make, Gentoo on top of Portage, or gittup[1] on top of tup. Running NixOS while you’re building your resume is irrelevant; using Nix to create the final artifacts is a material statement about the chosen toolset.

[1] https://gittup.org/gittup/

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

#99
post #14

Automating your resume is a bit of a rite of passage for new software engineers. It just feels like a stupid repetitive task. I've found that I change job summaries so often, that automating it was a net negative in time spent on the thing. So now I just do the same as the digitally challenged: copy a Word file to "resume (DATE).docx" and change the contents as needed. My younger self would be surprised, and slightly…

Except that it is a great learning experience.

Data driven resume was my introduction to LaTeX and I had a great time building it.

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

#100
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've made sure all the most commonly used ATS systems can read the produced PDF without issue.

Do you have any tips, code, or even just a list of the common ATS systems? I need to do this with my latex cv but I'm not even sure where to start.

I don’t know of the example systems but I’ve applied to a handful of companies recently, all running the same-ish workday resume ingestion. You can actually tell which are running a more recent version because the parsing is more accurate.

There is also a common no-account single page application software, I checked at a company I’d applied to and it was called Lever(?)

Normally, I thought for ATS parsing if you upload in an application and a few of the prior experience text boxes are accurate, then you’re good. I’ve always had to fix my experiences though, even with using a word doc.

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