The Overengineered Resume with Zola, JSON Resume, Weasyprint, and Nix

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Style Pass

2024-07-11 08:30:05

Maintaining a resume is not the most interesting use of time. Naturally, when I needed to bring my own up to date, I decided to spend a great deal more time on it and overengineer the process.

I'm only aware of one standard for representing resume data: JSON Resume. I always prefer to use standards where I can, although I'm disappointed there isn't a stronger ecosystem around this one. (And all the more that the major HR applications don't ingest it).

Because I wanted to avoid LaTeX, I decided to try templating my resume data into either Markdown or HTML and CSS and then rendering that content as a PDF. That also gave me the optionality I was looking for on output formats; if I wanted a resume web page, I could just publish the HTML with a different stylesheet.

I already use the static site generator Zola to build this website. Zola's Tera template engine is very similar to Jinja2, making it comfortable for me, and it's very fast.