maintaining a cv in markdown ¹

What I wanted was a single source of truth for my CV, absolving me of any need to maintain both an online copy I can link to, and a copy in something docs-like that I can mail around as a PDF.

The solution as it currently stands is that I write my CV in markdown, here on a GitHub pages site, and also run a GitHub actions workflow that uses md-to-pdf to render a PDF copy and commit it back to the repository.

For reference, the repository for this site is gilmoregrills/gilmoregrills.github.io.

rendering a pdf

You can reference the workflow on GitHub at .github/workflows/render-pdf.yml but the basic process is:

• On a push to main that includes a change to any file other than what’s in _renders/.
• Check out the repo containing this site.
• Use npm to install md-to-pdf, cat the markdown file containing my CV and pipe it to md-to-pdf with a bunch of inline arguments ².
• Another pre-made action commits the rendered PDF back to the repo in the _renders/ directory.

Every change to my markdown CV overwrites the previous PDF, so my latest CV is always available (for me) at _renders/robin-lightfoot-cv.pdf for me to fetch and send when I need it.

Currently both the styling of this site and the rendered PDF aren’t very beautiful, so my next steps will be to start working on that a little. Helpfully, md-to-pdf allows you to pass custom css to the cli & is pretty extensible, and this site uhh is a website so 😌✌️

1. created 14/05/24, updated 14/05/24 ↩

2. I initially used a markdown to PDF GitHub action, but I struggled to get emojis to render properly. for some reason emoji rendering was a hill I was willing to die on so that’s what I spent the majority of my time on. ↩