¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

For ages I’ve been using a resumé crafted in Google Docs. I was never a big fan of it, but it got the job done¹.

It was always one of my wildest dreams to rewrite my resumé in LaTeX.

The main challenge would be to either i) find a decent template or ii) create my own template. Thanks to Overleaf, i) is quite straightforward:

• https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/software-engineer-resume/gqxmqsvsbdjf
• https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/faangpath-simple-template/npsfpdqnxmbc
• https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/swe-resume-template/bznbzdprjfyy
• https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/software-engineering-resume/mcvwcrmddsyw
• https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/rendercv-engineeringresumes-theme/shwqvsxdgkjy

I could either use overleaf itself, or do everything locally (e.g. with texlive + TeXShop.app in macOS).

Another possibility is to use Typst, which is a modern take for a typesetting engine. Think of writing LaTeX without having to know how to write LaTeX, using a markup language that heavily resembles Markdown.

They even provide a neat web playground, wherein the rendered document is updated near instantly. It’s such a superb user experience!

And it’s free and open source! It is capable of rendering multiple formats: markdown, html, png, pdf. The possibility of using the same source, with the same looks, for both your printed resumé (PDF) and your website (markdown, html) is very appealing.

The RenderCV project builds on top of Typst to build a turnkey solution to write your CV declaratively, purely from a YAML file².

All these initiatives are great. I have finally had the time to ditch Google Docs for a fully open source text format.

Now I am debating whether to embed my new CV into this website.

Automated scraping is naughty, but an in-context portfolio would be amazing. Perhaps I could simply put it behind a password-protected page? Or use symmetric cryptography to obfuscate it, with some bits of JavaScript to decrypt it upon using a pre-shared passphrase key. Of course, both approaches would be helpful only if I come up with a scheme to share the key with humans whilst making it hard for bots to decipher it. Perhaps a riddle? If the friction is too high, humans won’t get to fetch it though. We’ll see.