Writing a CV, a wrong way Link to heading

I’ve historically used Google Docs for my CV. It’s a great tool, but I’ve had some issues with it for my use case:

  • Styling was never consistent, and changing styles was difficult
  • Since I’m not a native English speaker and I’m a dyslexic, I had to keep going between sites like Grammarly and docs - which messed with the formatting (and I refuse to have it installed as a browser extension)
  • I’ve spent sooo fucking much time perfecting nvim configuration and building muscle memory that it felt like a waste not to use it everywhere.
  • It never felt fun

After having a blast with markdown for documentation and personal notes, I’ve been looking for a way to write my CV in plain text. I’ve researched a few options and decided to go with AsciiDoc.

AsciiDoc, a better way? Link to heading

AsciiDoc is a human-readable document format that is both simple and powerful. It’s a plain text format that can be converted to HTML, PDF, and other formats like markdown. But it seems so much richer; it’s wild.

After googling around, I found some examples that were already ready to use. The one that caught my eye was asciidoctor-web-pdf. Sadly, it was not packaged for nixos, so I’ve decided to test using docker.

Hammer time! 🔨 Link to heading

I’ve copied the example from the repository, uploaded my own images, and created a script to run the docker container:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e

DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd )"

docker run -i --rm \
  --volume=$DIR/:"/usr/app" \
  -u $(id -u ${USER}):$(id -g ${USER}) \
  ggrossetie/asciidoctor-web-pdf:latest \
  --template-require ./template.js resume.adoc

mv $DIR/resume.pdf $DIR/../blog-static/static/documents/resume.pdf
rm $DIR/resume.html

It uses the template and resources from the example and moves the generated PDF to the static folder of my blog 🪄.

Since the blog is deployed using nixos, I can just run the:

nixos-rebuild switch --target-host root@hetzner-blog --flake .#blog

and the new CV will be available on the internet under path /documents/resume.pdf 🎉. Check the series about blog deployment to learn more about the blog setup.

The results are satisfying, and I’m happy with the switch for a few reasons:

  • The source code is under version control
  • It’s much easier to paste it into tools like grammarly
  • I can tweak the look with CSS <3
  • I can easily share it with others by sending them a link to the pdf
Printscreen of the generated CV available here

Printscreen of the generated CV available here

You can copy the source code for the CV from here and have a brand new CV in no time.

Future improvements Link to heading

It would be awesome to package asciidoctor-web-pdf for nixos and use it directly without docker. I might look into that in the future.