Revisions: 7                     A Fancy Resume                     Éric NICOLAS
Latest: 2026-07-06               ==============                 ccjmne@gmail.com


    This project lets me build my current, static, professional resume.

    Find it at https://ccjmne.sh/resume, where it is generated anew every
    night.


Inside the Box -----------------------------------------------------------------

    This works by generating plain HTML pages, then printing them to PDF
    using Puppeteer [1].

    It may also generate a plain PNG image, whose output is stable
    enough to satisfy diff-ing needs; I am quite controlling regarding
    hyphenation—and many other things—and require that the resulting
    artefacts look a certain, authoritative way.


    Tools and Technologies -----------------------------------------------------

        Under the hood, it's all a labour of love: no pointless Web
        frameworks, nor any library for any sort of elements.  No canned
        designs, only a moving target that I find to suit my tastes of
        the year.

        It's all SVGs entirely generated by code, entirely hand-rolled.
        The seeds for the random number sequences are playful references
        to events that are meaningful to me.

        I composed a simple class, src/utils/easy-htmlelement.ts, that
        lets me compose the page in a single JavaScript expression; see
        src/1.ts and src/2.ts, respectively.

        The rendering of the VCS (dare I say Git?)-like tracks on
        the second page is also built in-house for the purpose of
        this resume.  It's a fairly lovely piece of code, found at
        src/utils/timeline.ts; it works off some bespoke data format
        that I found to be particularly practical to maintain, see the
        *timeline* variable exported by src/profile.ts.


    A few Lavish Affordances -----------------------------------------------

        This does use TypeScript for the data as well: what do you know,
        it's merely some more expressive and elegant JSON.

        In the end, I did also splurge for a ready-made bundler (I
        believe I went through plain shell scripts, then Grunt, then
        Gulp, then Webpack, then Vite—I've been at it a while),
        and ended up using SASS for some of its favourite features.
        I couldn't quite call this project minimalist; but heh, it
        saw the light of day at a time I was still bright-eyed and
        bushy-tailed: let the eager zeal of the overindulging youth
        of yesteryear permeate the mantle of what is today a frugal,
        austere, relentlessly economical contributor.


How-To -------------------------------------------------------------------------

    This project is packaged according to standard Node.js [2] practices
    (using pnpm [3], for good reasons):

        install dependencies:     pnpm install
        run in development mode:  pnpm start
        compile artefact once:    pnpm build

    Other utilities are available; package.json collates them.

    The output will be generated under *dist*.


    ------------------------------ Build Options -------------------------------

    The following environment variables can be set to customise the build:

    OUTPUT      the name of the output file

                - generates a screenshot if output ends in *.png*; otherwise
                  coerces extension to *.pdf*
                - defaults to *resume.pdf*

    HYPHENATE   whether to insert soft-hyphens [4] wherever applicable

                - is disabled by default in production builds, because having
                  ­ littered throughout each and every word isn't quite
                  SEO-friendly, and might even throw off ATSes [5]
                - is enabled when starting with *y*; defaults to *no*

    TWOPASS     whether to render the background as a raster image to be
                embedded as-is, then render the text in a superimposed layer

                - works around the staggering variance across various PDF
                  visualisers, at the cost of non-scalable backgrounds and
                  somewhat greater document size
                - is enabled when starting with *y*; defaults to *no*

    BROWSER_KEEPALIVE   how long to keep the spawned browser instance alive
                        (for successive reprints in development mode)

                - is expressed in milliseconds
                - defaults to 30,000 (30 seconds) for development, 0 for
                  production runs

    BROWSER_EXECUTABLE  the path to the Chromium executable to use

                - if unspecified, uses the first available executable among:

                    chromium, chromium-browser, google-chrome-stable,
                    google-chrome


    --------------------------- Deployment Procedure ---------------------------

        None.  Gets rebuilt and redeployed every night, so as to provide
        the most up-to-date employment durations.

        Continuous Integration is achieved via GitHub Actions [6],
        whereby in the dead of night (by the reasonable understanding of
        folks living in the Europe/Paris timezone), this here repository
        is checked out, its dependencies are installed (if not cached
        already), two PNG versions of the document are generated and
        compared (with and without automatic soft-hyphenation as per
        the rules expected of the adept English speaker), and if all is
        above board, the document is generated in two passes (see the
        TWOPASS build option) as a PDF and subsequently compressed to
        acceptable levels with Ghostscript [7].

        Provided that all of the above succeeded, that resulting
        artefact gets uploaded to a simple GitHub Pages [8]
        environment.

Licensing ----------------------------------------------------------------------

    GPL-3.0

        You may copy, distribute and modify the software as long as
        you track changes/dates in source files. Any modifications to
        or software including (via compiler) GPL-licensed code must
        also be made available under the GPL along with build & install
        instructions.

    In short, I didn't go most permissive.  This is ours.  It can be yours
    too, but neither it nor its descendants can be yours only.

    Refer to the LICENSE file for more details.


References -------------------------------------------------------------

    [1]: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer
    [2]: https://nodejs.org
    [3]: https://pnpm.io
    [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_hyphen
    [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applicant_tracking_system
    [6]: https://docs.github.com/en/actions
    [7]: https://ghostscript.com
    [8]: https://pages.github.com