Updated CV

Last week I got round to updating my CV, adding on my new job at Sky. I decided to take the opportunity to do something a little different with it this time round.

Being a web developer, with a strong focus on CSS, I chose to make the CV relevant by writing it as (obviously made-up/invalid) CSS.

Initially I actually just wrote everything out in one giant <pre> with <span>s just for colouring in, a little like this:

<pre>
/*------------------------------------*\
    PERSONAL
\*------------------------------------*/
#me{
    name:"Harry Roberts", Harry;
    age:21years;
}
...
...
</pre>

So far in I thought that that seemed a little too easy/lazy, and it also came with the massive issue of not being semantic, meaningful or just plain proper markup. A CV is a series of headings and lists, not a single block of preformatted text.

I got to work rewriting, refactoring and tidying and marked it all up properly, and moved any braces, comments and quotes etc out of the HTML and into the CSS making massive use of the content:; property.

The resulting document is a semantically sound, properly marked up CV that is transformed into a CSSesque appearance using, well, CSS.

CSS is so humbly powerful…

So, what does anyone think? Good idea? Too novelty? Seen any other cool developer CVs?

N.B. it may be worth noting that even though I’ve updated my CV, I’m not looking for a new job.

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By Harry Roberts on Monday, August 8th, 2011 in Personal. Tags: CSS, CV, HTML | 11 Comments »

11 Responses to ‘Updated CV’

kikito said on 8 August, 2011 at 11:14 am

This is a matter of personal taste (and monitor quality) but the brackets ({}) are a bit too pale IMHO. At first I thought the code was malformed, or maybe pythonesque.
Josh said on 8 August, 2011 at 11:30 am

It is certainly a cool idea! Not sure about readability though. Who would mainly be reading it? Would they know what CSS is?

Nice use of DL’s too ;)
ferdy182 said on 8 August, 2011 at 12:57 pm

And then the human resources girl who receive your CV has no idea of CSS and thinks it’s broken and throws it away :P

So that’s why I don’t try to make my CV looks like code ;)

But it’s nice to have on your website.
Jason said on 8 August, 2011 at 1:18 pm

I kinda like the idea. Depends on the type of person you think will be reading it. I can see it striking a chord with anyone who lives in CSS but i can also see some heads of department who are more project managers not really being able to read it fast.
Has given me an idea for a XML version though. :)
Mathias Bynens said on 8 August, 2011 at 3:11 pm

I do something similar for the headings on http://mothereffingcssescapes.com/ :)
Stephen James said on 8 August, 2011 at 3:39 pm

As long as the hiring manager is a programmer….otherwise….
Josh said on 8 August, 2011 at 5:29 pm

Have to say its a brilliant idea.

I’d almost attach it with a more “standard” CV that way Ms. Human Resources won’t mistake it, and you get the double whammy of showing off to those “in the know”

But then again, depends if you want to work for someone who puts someone who doesn’t know code in charge of hiring a web guy.
Travis said on 11 August, 2011 at 3:17 pm

I’d add some hResume microformat action to this and then you could use that to create downloadable version that human resources folks could use and search engines could index and surface.

http://microformats.org/wiki/hresume
Anthony Johnston said on 15 August, 2011 at 12:32 pm

nice..

how about this
jobBSkyB
rather than
job#BSkyB
Harry Roberts said on 15 August, 2011 at 1:28 pm

@Anthony: Because it’s a generic class of job with a more specific ID of BSkyB :)
Aaron Lumsden said on 17 August, 2011 at 4:44 pm

I love this idea. Really original and inventive. I hope you get the job lol! :-)

11 Responses to ‘Updated CV’

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