Resumify

Inspiration

Both Sladyn and myself have seen the struggle students wanting to pursue higher education go through while drafting a compliant CV/resume, be it for academic needs or job applications. We wanted to abstract the nitty-gritty of crafting a resume and having properly-named headings to make them ATS compliant. Resumify was born out of our frustrations of having to juggle with countless generic-looking resume templates, our inability to bend them based on our needs (grad school/work) and our struggles with complex latex code bases and unstructured word documents.

What it does

What it mean's for people in the modern corporate world is that your Your next job starts with your resume. It is all the more important for you to make a good first impression and Resumify let's you do this in matter of a few minutes. No more Latex or forcefully structured word documents. We have abstracted the complicated and made it simple so that you can focus on the important.

Resumify provides you with a user-friendly dashboard, beautiful designs and real-time database syncing. With a split-section layout, you get to focus your attention to areas that need work. Everything to help you grab that next offer that comes along your way.

Features

✔ No more Latex or complicated word document layouts
✔ Extensible themes
✔ Over 10+ out-of-the-box design choices
✔ Version controlled and synced with database
✔ Form layout for easy section management
✔ ATS compliant headings
✔ Live previews
✔ Download on the fly
✔ Easy to use even for novices
✔ MFA Authentication so that your documents are private to just you

and a lot more...

Themes

1. Class

2. Elegant

3. Eloquent

4. Flat

5. Kendall

6. Macchiato

7. Modern

8. Paper

9. Short

10. Spartan

11. Stackoverflow

12. Even

How we built it

Open-source is what drives Resumify. This project would not have been possible without these tools and technologies:

- Frontend: ReactJS, React Bootstrap, React Toastify
- Backend: AWS Amplify (GraphQL API, Database and Authentication), Express, Puppeteer
- Version Control: Git and Github
- PDF Preview: Adobe PDF Embed API's
- IDE: VS Code

Challenges we ran into

Both Sladyn and myself have seen the struggle students wanting to pursue higher education go through while drafting a compliant CV/resume, be it for academic needs or job applications. We wanted to abstract the nitty-gritty of crafting a resume and having properly-named headings to make them ATS compliant. We are proud of the solution that we have come up with however this wasn't without any struggles.

We wanted to use Lambda triggers for our GraphQL end-points and the best way to share dependencies was to create Lambda layers. However, Lambda layers support an unpacked size of 246 MB for shared dependencies. Trying Vercel's serverless did not turn out to be fruitful either since it too just provided an abstraction behind AWS Lambda.

The alternative left around for us was AWS EC2. While this initially turned out fine, serving our backend through a https was the next issue in our paths. We tried using a self-signed certificate using openssl and even tried using certbot to generate a temporary 90-day certificate so that browsers don't block the requests sent from our client to our server. This too had their own issues. Eventually however, with our persistance and will to help others, we were able to rise above all difficulties and thus Resumify materialized.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we managed to materialize our project despite the fact that some of the tools and technologies were completely new to us. We are also proud of the fact that we followed a clean workflow with possible work-arounds since the project ideation since that helped us to get past some of the issues we had at a later stage. Having a clean software development lifecycle helped us go a long way.

What we learned

• We learnt a lot about serverless architecture, dealing with cold starts, running headless chrome in a serverless architecture
• AWS services in particular AWS Cognito Pool, AWS App Sync and AWS Lambda layers.
• The issues with https in the later stages of the project development helped us to know about the alternatives to getting an ssl certificate like Let's Encrypt, self-signed authorization, etc.
• We also learnt a lot about handling of API calls in react and protected routes.
• Last but not the least, we also learnt about commitlint and husky and how we can use them to enforce our commit message standards.

What's next for Resumify

The future is bright for Resumify. Besides extensible plugins, we have plans to introduce the following features in the future:

* Speech to text for aiding the impaired
* Voice-based navigation and accessibility improvements
* Plugin for active markdown support
* Drag-and-drop sections and comprehensive section management
* Dynamic sections
* Plugin support and guide to bootstrap custom themes
* Timeline and diffs for version-control

Built With

• adobe-sdk
• amazon-dynamodb
• amazon-ec2
• amazon-web-services
• bootstrap
• docusaurus
• express.js
• graphql
• node.js
• puppeteer
• react
• slate