A quick word about my résumé...

Yeah, yeah. Less spiel, more real... (See also: System Administration, or Webmaster vesions.)

These pages are the culmination of an 8 month `copious spare time' project. I had two goals: the first was to teach myself XSL:FO with a fairly complex (or at least exacting) example as a project. The second goal was far more important in the long run, but it was contingent on the first. I wanted to produce all of the versions of my résumé from a single content source. It was time to liberate both myself and my résumé from the tyranny of my previous update mechanism.

I believe I have accomplshed both. I now feel that I have a firm grasp of XSL:FO. And now, no matter how extensive a change I need to make, I put content in one file and formatting in a handful of others, and then I type `make.' Make then produces 3 types resume. Each type has 3 different versions of the HTML, 2 PDF versions, and a text version. That's quite a few files!

The content is stored in an XML file conforming to (a super-set of) the HR-XML Consortium's >Resume XML-Schema. Using XSLT, I transform the content into an intermediate XML format conforming to an XML-Schema that I wrote specifically for this purpose. Finally, A mixture of XSLT and XSL:FO, I produce framed, non-framed, and "all-in-one" (CSS & Javascript included) HTML versions, as well as a PDF version for the web and one for printing. (Ok, ok, I admit it. That's not enough control for me. I also have a perl script to tweak the PDF at the end.)

To understand what a joy that is, and why I giggle like a schoolgirl every time I type `make' and walk away, it is necessary to understand how I used to keep my résumé. Because I am so anal-retentive (yes, Stork, that's an en-dash) about the formatting, I kept my printed résumé in a PageMaker document, since it gave me control over the most minute of details. Any substantial change would "necessitate" (mostly in my own mind) a geometric amount of time spent: (iteratively)

1. Spend hours tweaking the formatting and spacing in the PageMaker document,
2. Generating Postscript,
3. Distilling it to a PDF file,
4. Modifying the properties and adding note floaters.
5. Invariably finding a mistake and having to repeat the entire process.
6. (To say nothing of the time spent procrastinating with 1. instead of working on content.)

Of course, I also needed an HTML version. But because I was, at various times, a "Document Designer," a "System Editor," and a "Webmaster" (back when that meant something) of the old-school (and I still write my HTML in Emacs) I couldn't abide the HTML produced by PageMaker's own "converter." So after all that, I had to make similar changes to my HTML résumé.

In the end the entire process would drag on for days for each complete iteration. Because it was such an arduous process, I tended to put it off and do it as infrequently as possible, even though I am a firm believer in the assertion that your résumé should always be up to date. It's nice to live by that assertion again.

Finally, I'd like to acknowledge some people without whom this endeavor would have been impossible. All of my XML, XSLT, and XSL:FO parsing, transforming, and rendering was done using the Apache XML Project's Java XML tools. I'd especially like to thank the FOP developers, I've watched this tool mature fairly rapidly over the last 8 months.

Thank you for humoring me and reading to the bottom of this page (or at least pretending to.) Without further delay, here are my resumes: Software Engineering, System Administration, and Webmaster/System Editing.