zk/diary/2011-04-18-14:39:51.md

%title 2011-04-18 14:39:51 %date A Visual Resume :blog:fossil:diary:

At the beginning of this year, I had two jobs.  By March, however, I had quit one and been informed that I was, for all intents and purposes, being laid off from the other.  While this wasn't a huge surprise, I was still pretty disappointed - time to start the job-hunt again.  I brushed up my resume, pulled all my references together, and got started searching.  As I applied and attended job fairs and the like I started noticing a disheartening trend, however.  I'm graduating in May with a degree in music composition, but applying for technical jobs.  More than I once, I was turned down without further consideration as soon as the recruiter got to the education section of my resume.

Rather than be coy about my education, however, I'm combining the fact that much of my applying for jobs happens online with my resume into a visual resume that offers all the same information while show-casing my design and visualization abilities.

There's a lot of conflicting information on how to structure a resume these days - should it be restricted to one page?  How personal should you be?  Avoid using 'I'? Should you have an overview or skills section?  While I can't say one way or the other what's best for a personal resume (personally, I keep it to one page, have short overview and skills section, use 'I' while still being professional), I had a little more freedom working with visual resume.  Not only would it be divided up into separate pages  for clarity's sake, I could take a little more time on each page to talk myself up and explain the accompanying graphics.

This project used, of course, Protovis, but I also included a map using OpenLayers and with CloudMade tiles.  It was nice to get back into the swing of mapping again, as I haven't really touched that in a while with the library maps project being shelved.  And of course, it was fun to work with Protovis as always.  The biggest problem came up when I had finished the whole project, though, and started checking it in other browsers.  Chrome: great.  FireFox: great.  Safari on iOS: great.  Internet Explorer: ...nothing.  Neither Protovis nor OpenLayers would work properly in IE8 64bit.  This could prove to be a problem.  The solution I'm working on is to export the graphics generated by Protovis (SVG format) to a format that IE does recognize and have an IE version of the page (done unobtrusively, of course, using IE's browser-specific tags).  The plus side to this is that, since I will have the graphics already exported, I'll be able to pull together a paper version of this resume that I can print out on glossy and use in some circumstances in person.  The down side being that I lose almost all the interaction that I have in place currently in the other browsers.  Ah well.