I got tired of editing my resume in HTML and then printing a PDF from Chrome. I now use GitHub Actions and a json resume to generate both formats.

Defining a JSON Resume

There's a jsonresume project that defines a JSON Schema for a resume. You can find the schema repo here.

I wanted to define my resume like this so I could easily generate multiple formats of it. My file can be found here. I used to use the resume-cli project to generate the html and pdf version of my resume, but it stopped working for me awhile ago.

I decided to convert the theme I was using to a Go template instead. That template is here. It treats resume.json as a map so the template just directly accesses the properties.

// hack/template.go
tmpl := template.Must(template.ParseFiles("hack/resume.html.tmpl"))
bs, err := ioutil.ReadFile("resume.json")
if err != nil {
  log.Fatalf("couldn't read resume.json: %v", err)
}

f, err := os.Create("resume.html")
if err != nil {
  log.Fatalf("couldn't open out.html: %v", err)
}
defer f.Close()

var params map[string]interface{}
err = json.Unmarshal(bs, &params)
if err != nil {
  log.Fatalf("unable to unmarshal json: %v", err)
}

tmpl.Execute(f, params)

Now I can get the HTML version of my resume with go run hack/template.go which will output a resume.html file. I could then open this in chrome and print it from there, but that's so much effort 😉.

Generating Multiple Formats in GitHub Actions

I already had a GitHub Actions workflow that would sync my resume from the resume repo to my personal-site repo, but I was manually pushing the HTML and PDF files to the resume repo. Now that I have the HTML generation working again, I decided to automate the entire process. That includes creating GitHub Releases.

My resume repo kasuboski/resume now has a create-release workflow. Pushing changes to resume.json or tagging a commit will now do the below.

• Generate the html with go run hack/template.go
• Generate a PDF using fifsky/html-to-pdf-action
• Add the html and pdf as a build artifact (so you can manually inspect before releasing)
• Create a release for a tag with the files
• Update my personal site with the new files if they've changed

Updating my resume now involves just updating resume.json and the files are generated and pushed to my site.

Future

I'd like to start managing more things like this. Maybe pushing to my LinkedIn profile or updating a GitHub profile README. It'll be like GitOps but more Git…personal info.