My hackday project is live: The Resume Builder

Last Friday, I got my first project up on LinkedIn Labs: Resume Builder. This little app will take your LinkedIn profile and convert it into a beautiful resume. You just sign in with your LinkedIn account, pick from one of the many resume templates, customize what sections are visible and their order, and then print & share to your heart's content. Some samples: sample 1, sample 2, sample 3.

The Resume Builder was my first hackday project: it won "most likely to launch" back in March, 2010. What motivated me was the frustration of maintaining my "professional profile" in multiple places. I had Word and PDF documents all over my computer, my LinkedIn profile, my homepage, etc. Every time I needed to send my resume somewhere, I wasted hours searching for the latest one and often times had to resort to some old version that I tracked down in my gmail "sent mail" folder. Once I joined LinkedIn, I figured it was time to keep my professional data in one place and produce all other formats from it, and I tested this idea out as a hackday.

The reaction to my hackery was very positive, and while it took me a while to get around to it, the Resume Builder has finally been converted into a fully functional app. The best part was that it gave me the opportunity to learn and play with a number of "best of breed" technologies: Ruby on Rails, jQuery, Compass, SASS, the LinkedIn APIs, and Markdown. Naturally, these are all part of my resume now.

I created the Resume Builder Blog to track updates to the project as well as the Resume Builder IdeaScale community to give users a chance to leave feedback, report bugs, and vote ideas up and down. If you have some time, give the Resume Builder a try and let me know what you think!