More Code. More!

[FlyingRhenquest 1]

I got rolling on some C++ code again. Here's a link to the source for the application:

https://github.com/FlyingRhenquest/resumetron

I really like the PDFs generated from the LaTeX output. LaTeX documents are usually beautiful. It's a typesetting language that a lot of textbook publishers still use. I'm probably going to run it by my friendly neighborhood HR droid at work and see if they have any suggestions for improvement. In my experience they never actually your resume anyway, so I'm tempted to collapse the entire job history down (The program will do this for you) and fit the entire couple decades onto one page.

I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

[BIGUN 1,485]

I think it would be great for the technical interview; but not the one to HR. Remember your target audience.

Nobody has time to listen; because they're desperately chasing the need of being heard.

[FlyingRhenquest 1]

I'd think that'd depend largely on how you format it. It's awfully terse with everything collapsed, but if you set it to collapse everything older than 7 years you still get a fairly small document and provide the most relevant information from your past two or three jobs.

Even fully expanded, after cleaning it up it's only about 4 pages long, which doesn't seem too bad to me for a 20+ year career. Oddly I hadn't realized that I'd worked for that few companies -- only 12 with a lot of contracting work. It really felt like more. I had to go back and double-check that I hadn't missed a couple.

LaTeX makes a visually impressive document. Very clean. It was originally designed by Donald Knuth and handles white space and kerning better than any wyswyg word processor I've ever seen. My original resume was in TeX because they had it on the DEC Vax at the college I was attending at the time. I suspect that the output quality of the document got my foot in the door at more than a couple of companies back in the day -- that was back before laser printer output was common and the USPS was the name of the game for getting a document to a company.

As more companies moved to the internet, more recruiters started asking for the document in Word format, which is why I'm going to write an HTML formatter for this thing in a week or two. You can load an HTML document into word and that works fine. Doesn't look great compared to the PDF from LaTeX, but it works.

If enough of them ever agree to a standard XML format for data interchange, I could just emit to that and call it good, too. Oddly for all the job boards out there, you never seem to hear about anything like that. I really expected that to be the first thing that happened once Monster got rolling, but I can never find anything when I go looking. Maybe I should write a resume REST API for web services and pitch it to some recruiting companies.

I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?