<p>At the beginning of this year, I had two jobs. ÂBy March, however, I had quit one and been informed that I was, for all intents and purposes, being laid off from the other. ÂWhile this wasn’t a huge surprise, I was still pretty disappointed - time to start the job-hunt again. ÂI brushed up my resume, pulled all my references together, and got started searching. ÂAs I applied and attended job fairs and the like I started noticing a disheartening trend, however. ÂI’m graduating in May with a degree in music composition, but applying for technical jobs. ÂMore than I once, I was turned down without further consideration as soon as the recruiter got to the education section of my resume.</p>
<p>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 <ahref="http://resume.drab-makyo.com">visual resume</a> that offers all the same information while show-casing my design and visualization abilities.</p>
<p>There’s a lot of conflicting information on how to structure a resume these days - should it be restricted to one page? ÂHow personal should you be? ÂAvoid using ‘I’? Should you have an overview or skills section? ÂWhile 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. ÂNot only would it be divided up into separate pages Âfor clarity’s sake, I could take a little more time on each page to talk myself up and explain the accompanying graphics.</p>
<p>This project used, of course, Protovis, but I also included a map using OpenLayers and with CloudMade tiles. ÂIt 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. ÂAnd of course, it was fun to work with Protovis as always. ÂThe biggest problem came up when I had finished the whole project, though, and started checking it in other browsers. ÂChrome: great. ÂFireFox: great. ÂSafari on iOS: great. ÂInternet Explorer: …nothing. ÂNeither Protovis nor OpenLayers would work properly in IE8 64bit. ÂThis could prove to be a problem. ÂThe 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). ÂThe 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. ÂThe down side being that I lose almost all the interaction that I have in place currently in the other browsers. ÂAh well.</p>
