JavaScript 101 — Create your online resume that will land your dream job

This blog post is included in a series where we are going to build a framework in JavaScript that will help us create our own resume engine. Find the series here.

I was once speaking to a very important recruiter and I asked him the following untactful question: “Isn’t it boring to look at resumes all day where some projects are fake, others are over described etc. It seems to me like job applicants focuse a lot on appearance which is not the most important”. And he answered the following “Appearance is very important and I developed a feeling of who is a good candidate and who isn’t according to his resume and his past experiences.” Then he went on describing his job and the techniques they have if they want to verify. Anyway, the most important aspect of this discussion is: having a resume to have the best visibility possible on internet is crucial, even more when you are a developer. Through this project I want to help you build your own resume while learning frontend web development.

We are going to build a framework in order to generate your website automatically. We will come up with an application to which we specify the data and it will generate the frontend application with JavaScript. For example, we will specify to our application “I worked here between this date and this date, I realized this project with these guys, please create my website” and boom, the website is created.

To talk to our application and give here our resume so that it can create our website, we are going to give it data in aspecial format. We will use JSON which stands for JavaScript Object Notation. Let me give you a concrete example of how this JSON object looks like:

This data structure is a simple, clear and centralized way of describing our resume data through a JSON object. It holds all the data that our resume needs.

The next step will be to render this data in a nice a tidy way. In order to do that, we will use html and css where we will specify.

Finally, our application will do the mapping between the model and the HTML (we will call it the “view” in the upcoming posts). In order to do it, we will parse the json data model and build the resume.

But the question is how to make the link between the model and the view communicate with each other? This is what we will see in the next blog post, in a week. Stay tuned.

Here is how the result will look like:

Credits to http://themes.3rdwavemedia.com for the template.