CV As Code

Fighting Word at 2am

Anyone who's updated a resume knows the exact feeling. You move one bullet and the whole second page rearranges itself. You nudge a margin and your name jumps to a new line. You export a PDF and somehow the spacing isn't what you were just looking at. I've genuinely lost hours of my life to a text box that wouldn't stay put.

At some point it hit me that I already use a tool that gives me total control over a layout and never reshuffles things on me for no reason. It's called a browser. So I started writing my resume in plain HTML and CSS, and CV As Code grew out of that.

Your resume, except it's just code

The idea's simple: you write your CV in HTML and CSS, you get a live preview in the browser that updates as you type, and when it looks right you export a clean PDF. Since it's just code, it goes in version control, you can keep a separate branch for each kind of job, and you control every pixel instead of fighting a template.

The PDF gets rendered through a headless browser at really high quality, so it's sharp enough to actually print. And there's a built-in check that reads the PDF back the way a job-application bot would, so you can make sure a robot can actually read your name and job titles before you send it off.

The bit I didn't see coming

Here's the part I didn't plan for: writing your resume as code makes AI assistants weirdly great at helping. You can point one at your CV and a job posting and ask it to tweak the wording, tighten a bullet, restyle a section, and it just edits the files like any other code. Your resume goes from "thing you dread opening" to something you can actually mess with quickly.

It'll even install what it needs if you don't have it, and it shuts its own server down when you close the tab, because the one thing I refuse to build is a tool that leaves something running in the background forever.