I Hadn’t Written a Resume Since 2008—So I Coded One Instead
TL;DR: I needed a resume for the first time in years—so I built an interactive, data-driven Resume Viewer in React. It’s not just a PDF: it’s a web app th...
I Hadn't Written a Resume Since 2008—So I Coded One Instead
TL;DR:
I needed a resume for the first time in years—so I built an interactive, data-driven Resume Viewer in React.
It’s not just a PDF: it’s a web app that visualizes my experience, skills, and career journey with custom views, structured data, and transparent design.
Explore the prototype, see the code on GitHub, or contact me to learn more.
A few weeks ago, something hit me:
This was the first time since 2008 I actually needed a resume.
Not just to update one—but to truly use it. To stand out. To get noticed. To say, “Hey, here’s what I can do,” in a way that actually lands.
But after 20+ years of building software—scaling platforms, leading teams, and writing enough code to fill a small library—a two-page PDF just felt wrong. Flat. Lifeless.
So instead of formatting another résumé in Word…
I built one in React.
⚡️ I Didn’t Want to Tell You. I Wanted to Show You.
When I saw a job posting that really excited me, I started asking:
“How do I get someone to see me?”
“What can I create that shows—not tells—what I bring to the table?”
That was two weeks ago.
Since then, I’ve been sprinting.
Not on cover letters.
But on code.
🛠 Introducing: The Resume Viewer (Prototype v0.1)
I built a custom, interactive resume viewer using:
- React, Tailwind CSS, and TypeScript
- JSON Resume schema as the content engine
- Hosted on GitHub Pages and free to use for personal purposes
This isn’t just a resumé with animations. It’s a touchable artifact—a tool that lets employers feel how I think:
- Frontend polish
- UX structure
- Data modeling
- And the engineering thought process behind it
The Resume Viewer is more than a showcase—it’s a prototype web application designed to highlight my professional web development skills. It demonstrates my expertise in coding, UX design, and data analysis, while serving as a public portfolio piece for potential employers.
🧭 Four Views. One Purpose.
I built the Resume Viewer around four primary views—each with a different focus, each in various stages of completion. Each view is a different lens on my experience, and each is evolving as I experiment and get feedback.
1. Visualizer View
“I built an animated timeline using D3.js that visualizes my career over time—something no PDF can ever do.”
This is the heart of the project—a dynamic, D3.js-powered timeline that visualizes my career journey. Right now, you can zoom and pan across the years, and see how the companies I’ve worked at changed over time. But this is just the beginning.
Where I want to take it:
I’m aiming for a truly interactive experience. Imagine being able to click on a job title and have the timeline zoom in, revealing more granular details—projects, skills used, even key achievements—animated right into view.
I want subtle data overlays: maybe skill trends, company logos, or even animated transitions that help you feel the flow of my career, not just read about it. The goal is to make exploring a resume as engaging as browsing a well-designed dashboard.
2. Text View
“Printable, readable, and familiar. But with a twist.”
This is the “classic” resume, but with a twist. It’s clean and structured, but also data-enhanced: you’ll see inline skill analysis, job tagging, and timeline insights woven right into the text. It’s designed to be instantly familiar to hiring managers, but with richer context and smarter organization.
What’s next:
I want to add more dynamic features—like toggling between condensed and expanded job descriptions, highlighting skills as you hover, and surfacing quick stats (e.g., “Most-used tech at this company”). The idea is to keep it readable, but make it smarter and more interactive than any PDF.
3. Infographic View
“I needed to show you the concept, even before the pixels were perfect. Because good feedback comes early.”
This is the least finished view, but intentionally so—what’s there now is a collection of early experiments, meant to show the many different ways resume data can be visualized. Think of it as a sandbox for ideas: company logos, skill maps, and role summaries, all in one place.
Where I want to take it:
My next step is to transform this into a true infographic of the person—something that instantly communicates high-level stats, number of jobs, years of experience, and top skills in a visually compelling way. But I don’t want it to stop at static charts. I want it to be interactive:
- Quickly scan and digest the big picture—who I am, what I’m good at, and where I’ve been.
- Drill down into a specific skill and see how it’s evolved over time, or filter the entire infographic to highlight just that skill.
- Explore connections between roles, skills, and achievements, with animated transitions and interactive filtering.
- Allow hiring managers to get both a fast overview and the ability to dive deep, all in a beautiful, engaging presentation.
Ultimately, I want the infographic view to be the fastest way to “get” someone’s story—at a glance and in depth, with both style and substance.
4. Raw JSON View
“I believe in observability and transparency. This view exposes the underlying resume data powering everything.”
I wanted to provide a direct window into the data behind the scenes—the actual JSON that powers the entire resume experience. Observability is important: this view lets you quickly look deeper into the raw data, making it easy to debug, troubleshoot, or just understand what’s really driving the presentation.
Right now, it simply shows the core data used to render everything. But my vision is to expand this further:
- Show not just the raw data, but also the calculations, stats, and metadata that are derived from it—surfacing insights in a friendly, explorable way.
- Allow you to drill down into specific sections, see how stats are computed, and even download the JSON for your own use.
- Make it a tool for transparency, quick debugging, and deeper understanding of how the resume is structured and validated.
All of this is built on top of Zod schema validation (with my own extensions), so you can trust that the data is both well-structured and extensible. If you want to see how the schema works, check out the documentation linked below.
📊 The Data Behind the Design
Let’s talk about what powers this whole thing: structured data.
Instead of hardcoding my experience, I built the Resume Viewer around the JSON Resume schema—but I didn’t stop there.
The standard schema is a great starting point, but I wanted to go deeper. So I extended the base 1.0.0 schema to support richer modeling:
- You can now associate specific skills with each job, not just a flat list.
- Skills can have their own time ranges, so you can see when and where I used them.
- Locations, references, and other attributes are now full objects, not just strings—making it possible to analyze and visualize my experience in new ways.
This means the Resume Viewer isn’t just a static display. It’s data-driven and designed for exploration. Want to see which skills I used at which company? Or how my expertise evolved over time? Now you can.
If you’re curious about the technical details, I’ve documented the schema system—including how I layered custom extensions on top of the JSON Resume spec—right here:
👉 Schema Documentation (README)
So, whether you’re a hiring manager, a fellow developer, or just someone who loves data, you can dig into the structure behind the scenes—and see how thoughtful modeling unlocks new ways to tell a story.
🔍 The “Why” Behind It All
“I’ve been heads-down building production systems for years, and ironically, none of that shows up in a GitHub profile.”
This project was my way of fixing that.
To show code. To show thinking.
To give hiring teams something they can actually use and feel.
From scratch, I hand-built almost every component. The only external library? Recharts for some early data visualizations. Everything else? Custom—and proudly so.
🧪 A Prototype in Motion
This is very much a work in progress—and that’s by design.
I’m sharing it early, not because it’s perfect, but because I believe in building in the open and learning from real feedback. Every feature, every view, every bit of polish is evolving week by week. Some things are rough, some are experimental, and some are just sketches of what’s possible.
Here’s what’s on my radar for the next iterations:
- Smarter filtering and drilldowns for skills and projects
- Dashboard-style metrics to visualize my tech stack usage
- More interactivity—think click-to-expand roles, skill timelines, and richer data exploration
- Design refinements and mobile optimizations to make it shine everywhere
If you have thoughts, ideas, or just want to see how a prototype grows into something production-ready, I’d love for you to follow along—or even join the discussion on GitHub.
💡 But Wait—There’s More
This viewer? Just one of many systems I’ve built (and broken, and rebuilt) over the years:
- All Kids Network: My side project that’s reached millions of families. I built the backend, the React CMS, and everything in between—just to see if I could make something that scaled and actually helped people.
- AI tools and assistants for enterprise content and email: Not just prototypes—these are live, in-production systems that help real teams work smarter, every day.
- Resume platforms that crunch over a billion rows of data and send up to 25 million emails/day: Architected for scale, reliability, and privacy—on-prem, in the cloud, you name it.
When I say I build things from the ground up, I mean it.
Not just code—but platforms people actually use.
🙏 Thanks for Reading
“The companies I thrive in are the ones where I can write code, build something real, and see it used.”
That’s what this is.
And if it resonates with you—whether you’re hiring, curious, or building something yourself—I’d love to hear from you.
📬 Let’s connect → radleta@gmail.com
2025
2024
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