Edit 2022-01-19: I’ve since moved the script to a public repo. Also, I’ve reformatted my resume to make it a bit shorter, so here’s a more recent PDF version.
I only want to have one canonical resume, and I want to keep it on my personal website. That makes it trivial to update, and anyone with the link can see the latest version at all times.
But unfortunately very few job application systems will accept a link to a resume. Most want a
document of some kind. I didn’t want to maintain a second copy as a Google Doc or something like
that, so I wrote
a script to transform the web version to a PDF.
Here’s a copy of the PDF version.
When I first looked into doing this I was afraid it would be a lot of work. Fortunately, it turned out to be super easy1. It’s in Perl, of course. This script is true glue code, and Perl made this work trivial.
All it does is grab the raw HTML from the page, munge it a bit, and then pass it through Pandoc. Pandoc is great. It uses LaTex as the intermediate format to generate the PDF, so it ends up looking very professional (IMO) with no work on my part!
I wrote the first version back in 2016 when I knew I was looking for a new position. I’ve made a few tweaks to it over the years as the web version has changed, but not many.
So in summary, yay Perl, yay Pandoc.
Barely an inconvenience. ↩︎