📄 Developer Resume Tip

One of the more stressful parts of building a resume for me was making sure it wasn’t too long while also being insightful to my career. Especially as my experience began to grow and vary, it was tough to keep track of all the things I did. Not to mention developers’ are greatly encouraged to have a personal site to expand on ones personality and previous works (admittedly my favorite part) 💻 but juggling a resume, personal site, and lets not forget LinkedIn, it quickly becomes a lot. So I was very excited when I discovered this free developer tool to assist with all this. This isn’t a sponsored post or anything, just one my developer resume tips I wanted to share on how I develop my resume.

🛠️ What’s the tool?

The tool is GitConnected and it’s become my source of truth for my resume. It becomes a single place for you to keep your work experiences and any other possible resume information in a single location, while also providing an API to reference your resume on your site or exporting it directly to a pdf document.

✨ Features.

Here’s some of the cool things it can do for you:

• It allows you to customize the sections of your resume you’d like to include, expanding beyond the straightforward work experience.
• It exposes an API for your resume, so you can quickly reference any aspect of it in your projects.
• You can automatically connect your GitHub, to easily add a projects section with your favorite public repos to showcase.
• It keeps tracks of your “skills” (i.e. language, framework, tools etc.) and allow you to associate a year of experiences to it, so it can auto-increment itself, as well as a understanding level.
• You can export all this information to a PDF, already nicely formatted in a clean template.

☕ How I develop my resume.

When I first started using the tool, I loved using the easy PDF version as my resume I used in job applications, but as my experience grew I realized I’d like to keep my “physical” resume more lightweight so I can keep it at a max-length of a single double-sided page. But I also didn’t want to completely erase all the details of my experiences.

So I continue to use this tool as my source of truth, and keep the nitty-gritty version of my resume there. With this I utilize API to populate the high majority of my portfolio site with it. For my physical resume, a well as LinkedIn, I pick and choose the highlights from my experience, maybe simplify the phrasing to make it even shorter, and copy/paste those specific highlights I’d like to include. This allows me to keep my physical resume at a page lengths, while always having a more detailed version available online.

💻 How to use GitConnected.

Another reason I love this tool is because it’s pretty simple to use. After signing up, use the Resume Builder to build your resume. From here it’ll show you the basic sections you can fill out and allow you to add more or custom sections. For me, the sections I like to include are:

• About with a brief introduction
• Skills with all the languages, frameworks, and tools I actively am working on progressing with throughout my career
• Experience with as many highlights I did at that role that I can think of
• Projects with my favorite projects
• Education for my English degree
• Interests with just a couple simple fun facts about me

As I mentioned, these all aren’t in my physical resume but I love using all of these for my personal site. Here’s how I implemented it in my React TypeScript application. 👇🏻

From personal preference, I start by with a directory called lib with this new file called api.tsx. You can easily make this without TypeScript by using a api.js file instead. It’s a straightforward API, but here’s how I asynchronously call it using fetch.

// a custom interface I made to have a quick reference of exactly what's being returned.
import GitConnectedPortfolio from "@/interfaces/gitConnected";

export const getGitConnectedPortfolio = async (): Promise<GitConnectedPortfolio> => {
    return await fetch('YourAPIInfo')
        .then(res => res.json())
        .catch((err) => console.error(`🚨Issue getting resume data: ${err}`));
}

async function getGitConnectedPortfolio() {
    return await fetch('YourAPIInfo')
        .then(res => res.json())
        .catch((err) => console.error(`🚨Issue getting resume data: ${err}`));
}

// Export it to make it available for other files
module.exports.getGitConnectedPortfolio = getGitConnectedPortfolio;

From here any of your other areas of your project can reference your single source of truth, also allowing you to quickly keep your site always updated since you don’t have to worry about needing to be near your laptop to change any hardcoded information.

🌆 Conclusion

No surprise but one of my software developer resume tips is to try and keep the process as easy and simple for yourself. This tool makes it not only easy but helps make your resume more dynamic and buildable, like the code many of us aspire to write, helping you gain more time to continue working on the contents of your resume or on new projects to add to it. If you need to develop your resume or continue striving towards having the best developer resume, this tool will help make that goal a lot easier.

Hope you enjoy! 🥂