Getting my CV into a semantic markup language has been something that I've wanted to get around to for a while. I've been aware of the JSON Resume project for some time, and at least from my perspective I've seen it's populatirity steadily grow in the dev space having screened a fair number of applications from candidates that have included CV's created this way.

From my lens, the major appeal is...

• Having my CV under source control.
• Easily rendering that JSON to different formats, e.g. HTML and PDF.

As i'll be searching for my next gig shortly, now seemed a good a time to action the itch and migrate my CV over. There are plenty of scaffold projects to help get started, hence it was easy enough to create a HTML version of my CV using one of the many themes available. Once up and running, that's when I realised that I just couldn't find a theme that would render my CV specifically how i'd like, so it was going to be a case of 'rolling up my sleeves' and getting hands on adapting one of the many themes to better suit my specific needs, the result of which is a new theme called Americano.

There's several minor styling tweaks, and actually behind the scences I was able to greatly cleanup a lot of the theme code and fix some inconsistancies against the schema. But the main changes I wanted to make were...

• Single column view, with content moved from the side bar and bought into the main document.
• Group positions by company as to more easily highlight promotions, something that I think LinkedIn does quite well and I was keen to replicate.
• Better highlight tools and technologies used at each specific company, something as a hiring manager I find mighty important.
• Other layout adjustments to make it easier to hit the 2 page sweet spot.

Achieving some of the above required some more invasive changes than I'd anticipated, but once I get started on something I really do enjoy getting deep into the inner workings and, when appropriate, making big changes. To meet my goals, I also had to extend the offical schema to support some additional properties, which I've documented in more detail in the README

Overall I'm pleased with the first iteration, andafter updating the toolchain to lean on Playwright to handle/automate the PDF generation I've now got an up-to-date CV that's under source control, that I can now use to apply for any roles that I'm interested in.

There's still some minor improvements that I want to make to the theme over the next couple of weeks, but it's been a fun little project and I feel confident that the CV's the theme renders are well presented and will visually stand out compared to others.