How to automate your resume in R Markdown

Nick McMillan

Link to slide version

Why automate?

1. Updating a resume can be time consuming!!
2. Different jobs may require specifically tailored resumes
3. We are data journalists and using our skills to make our lives easier is fun!

What we will cover

1. Markdown
2. Format a CSV to be the resume "backend"
3. Tools in R
   • Rmarkdown
   • Pagedown
   • Purrr

What is Markdown?

"Markdown is a lightweight markup language that you can use to add formatting elements to plaintext text documents."

-- Markdown's website

Markdown vs WYSIWYG

Markdown Examples

# This is a heading

## This is a subheading

### This is a sub sub heading

*This text is italic*

**This text is bold**

This is regular text

Test it out in this online markdown editor

Fun Fact

This presentation was created in Markdown and a program converted it into a slide!

A sample markdown entry

### PhD. Candidate, Biostatistics

Vanderbilt University

Nashville, TN

2011-2015

- Working on Bayesian network models & interactive visualization platforms
- University Graduate Fellow

How to get from Markdown to HTML Resume?

Pagedown

• Complex: "an R package based on a JavaScript LIbary to paginate the HTML output of R Markdown documents"

Pagedown

• Simple: Makes R markdown look pretty on the web/document form

How to format the CSV

• Headers
  • section
    • education, experience ..
  • title
  • location
  • institution
  • start_date
  • end_date
  • description 1-3
  • boolean

R Markdown Code

1. Set chunks to asis
   • This treats output text as pure markdown.

     knitr::opts_chunk$set(results = 'asis')
     

R Markdown Code

Concept: string literals

2. Use the glue() library to output string in a template format to create the format that the Pagedown resume template requires

R Markdown Code

2. Load your resume csv

R Markdown Code

Resume: Building out the descriptions

3a. Use pivot_longer() from tidyverse to transform the three descriptions into character list for each section

R Markdown Code

Resume: Building out the descriptions

3b. From the purrr library (part oftidyverse), use map() to iterate through each character list and append a bullet

Finally put it all together

• Combine into one function
• Select each section and put into R Markdown template
• Push Knit!

Resources + Tutorials

• This lesson is based on Nick Stayer's Blog Post
• Bryan Jenk's Blog Post
• Marp: to create a static Markdown driven slide presentations
• Revealjs: to create animated Markdown driven slide presentations