Legume

I recently finished my latest stint between jobs, which always involves lots and lots of interviews. One thing I noticed this time was that during my interviews, I had difficulty recounting stories from my career.

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

I’ve never really written any of them down - I always assumed that I’d just remember them forever. The hubris of youth caught up to me, as I now struggle to remember all the little details that make the stories interesting. This cut deeper than just some awkward moments during an interview. There’s a saying that it’s not how much you earn, it’s how much you keep. In the same vein, it’s not how much you experience, it’s how much you remember. If I haven’t remembered all the lessons I’ve learned, then to what degree am I actually experienced?

To address this, I resolved to sit down and write out as many stories as I could throughout my career. It turned out to be an incredible personal exercise.

It got me thinking about resumes in general, how much they suck, and how impersonal they feel to us. Why shouldn’t they feel deep and meaningful? Why shouldn’t we feel some personal attachment to them?

legume

I decided to try and formalize my writing exercise into a framework, which I called 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 an effective way to present your professional self that doesn’t boil down to whatever is on LinkedIn.

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.

link to github