Legume

Resumes kind of suck.

I was recently hired onto a very cool team, after an unusually long period of interviewing. One thing that stuck out to me this time was that I had difficulty recounting the details of relevant stories from my career.

I’ve been a programmer since roughly 2012, so I have quite a few fun nuggets to talk through.

My problem, I realized, is that I’ve never written any of it down. There’s admittedly some hubris in my belief that my memory would never fail me, but fail me it did.

I go back through my notes - surely I’ve written something about those stories? I find tidbits here and there, but mostly technical minutia about whatever I was working on that day.

If I look at my resume on LinkedIn, the problem becomes clear.

Resumes are supposed to be these dense artifacts that briefly summarize our professional history. We write them for recruiters, interviewers, and potential hirerers.

That’s all fine, of course, but here’s a crazy idea - what if you wrote a resume for yourself?

Go look at your own resume, and ask yourself how reflective it is of you as a person. Very likely, there’s so much interesting nuance and detail between and behind the bullet points.

Wouldn’t it be cool if resumes worked for us as well as for busy recruiters?

legume

In the midst of my job search, I began a project to do just that. I called it Legume.

I wanted

• to have a very simple, traditional looking resume, except
• it would be a live webpage, and
• each job entry would be a wiki-style link that
• linked to a blog post about that item

And that’s pretty much it. Very simple, but if taken seriously, could be wildly effective.

about writing

I’m sure many people would recoil at the idea of spending any more time on their resume than absolutely necessary. But here’s the thing: you wouldn’t just be doing busy work in order to look good for a recruiter. You’d be doing yourself the favor by recalling and expressing everything you’ve learned throughout your career.

There’s a saying that it’s not about how much you make, it’s how much you save. In the same vein, I’d say it’s not about how much experience you have, it’s about how much you remember.

Skills atrophy, and knowledge fades. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over my career, it’s that the simple act of writing is the best way to keep your sense of yourself sharp.

(it should go without saying that the intent is to actually write the stories yourself, not use AI)

how it works

Technically, Legume is pretty simple.

Your resume is just a folder on disk. At the root is a small core, written in YAML. That file holds ordinary resume data: bio, skills, jobs, dates, education, projects, and highlights.

But the interesting bit is that each entry can point to a Markdown file in your folder. The Legume web app uses Astro to render the YAML as a traditional resume page, then generates separate pages for each linked Markdown reference.

So the resume stays terse, but it morphs naturally into a wiki-style website.

where it is now

Legume is sitting in my side project graveyard for now, but I still like the instinct behind it. I may bring it back to life now that we have better AI coding tools.

Cheers.