Show HN: RxResume – A free and open-source resume builder

https://rx-resume.web.app

by AmruthPillai • 6 years ago

240 66 6 years ago

rx-resume.web.app

This is literally the best thing ever. I love the fact that you have everything I could ever want - colors, refresh the screen right away, and different designs too.

Bonus points for keeping everything offline because if I use this I would be afraid you would be keeping track of my keystrokes as I type in all of my personal information into the form. < - Please don't ever do this, anyone who may read this comment.

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

Hey there!

Thank you so much :) That was exactly what I was going for, complete privacy and complete customization possibilities. Plus, a lot of my friends keep saying that I have good resume design skills as I've made mine, and I used to release templates as PSD or Figma documents previously, but not everyone could edit them, so that's why I made this :)

I would never ever make it monetized or put ads or collect personal data in any sort of way. In all honesty, the only thing I have on the site is a Google Analytics script, and that's just to see how many people are using the site (to fuel my ego :D). But even that can be disabled if you use few browser extensions.

I really hope you keep using the app, please do let me know how I can make the experience much better :) Thank you!

darekkay• 6 years ago

and that's just to see how many people are using the site (to fuel my ego :D)

Depending on whether you have access to your server logs, consider using something like GoAccess [1] instead.

Kudos for your project :)

[1] https://goaccess.io/

vladvasiliu• 6 years ago

I've encountered some bugs on Safari. When attempting to scroll through the categories on the left and right sides, the selected entries are not visible.

Screenshot: https://ibb.co/SKxjMFf

Tested on: Safari 13.1 / MacOS 10.15.4

It looks OK on Opera 67.

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

Interesting... will try to replicate the same and get it fixed ASAP. Thank you so much for reporting the same :)

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

I'm not able to recreate the issue on my Macbook. It's the same, 13-inch MBP, macOS 10.15.4

https://i.imgur.com/ApLtH3T.png

dethi2• 6 years ago

Nice UI! A few comments:

- It would be nice to be able to see a preview of the template in full size

- How do you export the résumé at the end?

- I couldn't find the code. Where is it?

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

Thank you so much :)

I'll definitely look into what can be done about those previews. Right now, it's not that hard to just load the dummy data (from the Actions Tab) and cycle through the templates, but I'll look into making the process easier.

As for the export options, as defined in the Actions Tab, you can print the resume at any time and the browser has options to print as PDF. Also, you can export the data as JSON and import it back again, keeping it completely portable.

The GitHub Repository can be found here: https://github.com/AmruthPillai/Reactive-Resume

There is an About Tab as well which has the link to the repository from within the app :)

dethi2• 6 years ago

Oh, I didn't see the action time the first time. Maybe that should be more easily accessible/visible.

The dummy data loading, that's exactly what I was looking for when I suggested adding a bigger template preview.

chrismorgan2• 6 years ago

I started typing in a hex colour, and the page disappeared. And it’s persistently broken. (This is probably the biggest problem with storing persistent data, even including persistent caches of server data: if it’s broken, it stays broken. A great strength of the web historically was that reloading the page made things work again.)

Other than that, it looked better than most such things I’ve seen.

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

Hmm, that's weird. I had stress-tested the color options as much as I could. Even now, when I enter gibberish in the text field, it just doesn't do anything as the CSS is invalid. No reason the app should crash.

But anyway, I'll try to add some validation across the app so that this doesn't happen again. For now, to fix any issues at all, you only need to clear your local storage of the site. Here's how you can clear Local Storage on Chrome (https://www.leadshook.com/help/how-to-clear-local-storage-in...), similar steps for other browsers too.

Please let me know if that resolved the issue temporarily for you.

chrismorgan2• 6 years ago

Still hitting problems. I enter some details, pick what I think is the third theme, choose a shade of orange, then in the accent colour field press backspace, and it dies.

  TypeError: "can't access property "r", r is null"
    ye Gengar.js:7
    React 7
    unstable_runWithPriority scheduler.production.min.js:19
    React 9
    unstable_runWithPriority scheduler.production.min.js:19
    React 18
    251 index.js:20
    i (index):1
    70 main.f5214b72.chunk.js:1
    i (index):1
    t (index):1
    r (index):1
    <anonymous> main.f5214b72.chunk.js:1
  react-dom.production.min.js:209:194
  TypeError: can't access property "r", r is null
  Gengar.js:7:21

Aeolun3• 6 years ago

Ah, I did something similar at some point when looking for a job.

Only has a single template though. But my main concern was being able to export to both word and pdf, because recruiters always want word documents.

https://resumedrone.com/

I really like the way the templates look on yours :)

May have to try and implement live preview myself.

T3OU-736• 6 years ago

On MSWord format vs PDF:

Whilst interviewing people, if I know their resume came via a recruiter, I tend to ask for their real one. The reason is not to cut the recruiter out of the process. Rather, it is to make sure the resume (and the questions about its content) are based on an unaltered version. Sadly, some recruiters will modify a resume to fit the position description, and the process, make claims on behalf of the candidate which are... untrue.

So, PDF, being more difficult to modify, seems safer.

Aeolun3• 6 years ago

Oh, I agree as a hiring manager, but as an applicant I just cannot be bothered to keep replying that I don’t have a word version.

I used to say they can get it in either PDF or JSON ;)

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

That's actually a pretty great attempt. I have a lot to learn from your application as well. There are quite a lot of sections that I have omitted, which might be helpful for others. What did you use to build the app with? If React, maybe you can consider contributing to this project and making it as good as yours? :)

Aeolun3• 6 years ago

Yeah, it’s all React, well, mostly React, the Word and PDF rendering happens on an express backend.

I doubt I’m going to have any time to contribute, but I’ll have a look.

Did you base your schema on jsonresume? I did that with a few extensions.

ducaale• 6 years ago

There is also https://resumake.io/ which generates resume as a latex document. Github repo https://github.com/saadq/resumake.io

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

Wow, I did not know about this one. And it's pretty amazing, both design-wise and functionality-wise. Kinda makes mine seem pretty boring :D

Kudos to the developer :)

vs2• 6 years ago

yours is super awesome!

samdung• 6 years ago

Something similar: https://cv.me/ . But yours has more templates that i like.

edent• 6 years ago

This is a great app! But it is so weird seeing photos on a CV. In the UK it is almost totally unheard of. And most large organisations will have an HR department which would blank them out.

Your CV is for judging your work history and experience. What can I learn from a photo that I would legally be able to take a decision about?

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

Photographs on a Resume, I've heard is a standard in the EU. That's what I was told when I was applying to Jobs in Germany. And it's pretty common here in India as well.

But I completely understand where you are coming from. Photos can cause bias in the hiring process and it's certainly debatable. That's why I've provided the option to either add an image or not have one, and designed the templates especially to fit both use cases.

lukevp• 6 years ago

That’s really interesting! I’ve never gotten a resume with a photo here in the US.

vijaybritto• 6 years ago

Also the address can be used to harass or stalk women. My friend had her address in her resume and uploaded it to naukri.com. Some random guy showed up at her doorstep claiming that he had a job for her. They called the police immediately and he ran away. It was crazy and tools like this can add a note about the potential security implications.

pjmlp3• 6 years ago

Not at all, yes it is a requirement in traditional German companies, but not in most EU countries nor in German companies that are now fully digital in their hiring process.

In Portugal and Spain for example, it is long not welcomed that people send resumes with pictures.

globular-toast• 6 years ago

I read lots of CVs in the UK and do occasionally get pictures from non-natives. I find it very odd and would strongly discourage people from doing it. I'm not going to give you a job because of the way you look. I don't even care if you're human. You could be a dog but if you've got the chops and fit the team then I'll pay you in crunchy dog treats if that's what you want. I just don't understand what people are trying to achieve with their picture on the CV.

throwaway_pdp09• 6 years ago

Perfectly put. And employment agencies in the UK could not care less about your photo. Source: I worked[1] for one.

[1] I initially typed that as 'whored'. FYI.

spinningD20• 6 years ago

For the context of this app and in general, I would agree.

While I was at PyCon, I had prepped a version of my resume that had my photo on it, and during the job fair I shared them with folks and companies that interested me.

I figured, if there's any chance of someone remembering a person and wanted to recommend them, a photo would go well with the name and info. But maybe it was ineffective :) I didn't think it would hurt to include, at the very least.

dominotw• 6 years ago

I think it has something to do with "bio data" format that govt uses in India.

rohan10242• 6 years ago

Really good project. The only issue that I am facing is entire resume is messed up while printing it from Firefox.

Everything else is perfect!

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

Oh, yeah. I just noticed that. I guess that's an issue with Firefox's parsing of print CSS. Really unfortunate for them to not adhere to so many print CSS rules, considering Mozilla is pretty good when it comes to adopting new web technologies.

Sadly, I can't suggest any fix except using Safari or Chrome for now. I will look into what can be done to fix the issues regarding Firefox soon. Thank you for bringing this to my attention :)

rohan10242• 6 years ago

I tried in Chrome as well and the same thing happens. I actually created 2 page spanning resume and it does not print properly.

willio58• 6 years ago

At my work we’ve run into a similar issue with inconsistencies with print styles. To solve this we used a separate server with a library to convert the doc to a pdf, then gave that file to the user for printing. This may be overkill for this use case but it’s an option to look at.

gregd• 6 years ago

This is a really neat project! Good job.

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

Thank you so much :)

dbattaglia2• 6 years ago

Really love this, nice job!

Curious, do you have any interest in having the ability to import/export from the various cloud storage vendors (Dropbox, GDrive, possibly even Github Gist), or do you feel like it would go against the offline/"no servers" theme of the app?

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

It kinda touches on the border of not being offline, I don't know. A user would be able to just as easily upload the JSON to their respective Cloud Storage Provider, it would be a pain to support all of the major ones since there are so many.

Maybe when there's a clear need of one or more cloud services, this could be explored?

dbattaglia2• 6 years ago

Right, I was thinking the same thing, that you can easily just upload the file. The reason I thought of it is I showed this to my wife (who absolutely loves this btw!) and she immediately seemed confused when I explained the need to export the file. I've since convinced her but I wonder if this will not be obvious to those without a techie showing them?

Anyways if you are interested in adding this feel free to give me a ping I'd be happy to help! daniels.bytes at the google (daniel-bytes on Github). Again amazing job on this! <3

crabasa• 6 years ago

I am working on a "post-resume" product that helps developers express their skills, interests and preferences in a way that seeks to better connect devs to opportunities and eliminate the repetitive and low value questions in most phone screens.

It's very alpha, but I'd love to hear what folks think. Here's an example profile:

https://fizbuz.com/u/elginskye

I plan to ship a public GraphQL API that makes your data available for any use you can imagine, including generating a "standard" resume or building a personal website.

city41• 6 years ago

This is really great! It's easy to use, intuitive, and overall just really well done.

Small heads up, there are many dead scrollbars: https://i.imgur.com/FImuHVn.png

If you are developing on OSX, I recommend turning on scrollbars to make detecting dead scrollbars easier.

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

Oh, man. This has been a problem ever since I moved to macOS. Thank you so much for the heads up. Will fix it ASAP.

And thank you very very much, I really hope you continue to use the app and please do let me know if there's anything I can do to help make the experience much better :)

gillesjacobs• 6 years ago

This is a very nice resume builder. I like the aesthetics and will port my current LaTeX CV over to this next time I am on job search. Would be awesome if you could add "export as HTML" functionality so it can be hosted on webpages too.

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

I've been getting that feature request a lot, and if you are aware of any libraries that would print out minified HTML+CSS of a certain div/section, please do let me know. That's what I'm struggling with here since the whole thing is in React + Tailwind CSS, very connected to the build process.

the_resistence• 6 years ago

IN mainland China, pictures are used to filter out the pretty people.

ShorsHammer2• 6 years ago

Not that I use it, but do really like this initiative to make resumes machine readable:

https://jsonresume.org/

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

I did check out JSON resume, a bit later after I made this, but the schema that I'm using it's too far fetched from what JSON Resume uses, and with a few tweaks, like adding an ID field, or adding heading tags (so that resume sections headings can be in any language of the user's choice). The JSON I've made is a bit more flexible that way, specific to the application. Maybe this could be the new standard? (hehe)

ShorsHammer2• 6 years ago

Yeah I really like this better. JSON is terrible to write manually.

Still I respect their effort to try. Machines are already parsing resumes for keywords anyway.

stjohnswarts3• 6 years ago

Very nice other than the picture. I suppose one could upload their family crest or something.

aladine• 6 years ago

Do you support a feature like importing data from jsonresume.org. One nice thing about jsonresume is the json data is hosted in gist and once I append it to jsonresume.org/registry[github handle], I can view my resume directly in browser.

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

The structure of JSON I've designed is a bit better than JSON Resume as it has options to customize headings for the sections, this allows for multilingual resumes with no development effort necessary.

But I will definitely look into the option in which uploading a Gist or something would generate the resume as well, it shouldn't be that difficult.

kriskaminski• 6 years ago

Love the app and approach to privacy.

AmruthPillai18• 6 years ago

Thank you so much :)

Hanson762nh• 6 years ago

This is amazing, thanks for making this for free.

Show HN: RxResume – A free and open-source resume builder

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