Your new pretty and minimalist resume with LaTex
Tags: latex, resume, cv, career
Published: 2021-12-28 02:01:06

Hi everyone, today we are going to take a look at how we can create a pretty resume using **LaTex**.

## Minimalist and concise

When writing a [résumé](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9sum%C3%A9) we always want to achieve a **minimalist** and **concise** document to easily catch the eyes of any recruiter/company. To do so, we want to organize its content into 2 columns, having a good spacing for all the content to fit without losing readability. And here is where `LaTex` comes to the rescue. 

I split my resume into: **Skills** (33%) and **Work Experience** (66%) columns.

```latex
\begin{minipage}[t]{0.33\textwidth} 

\begin{minipage}[t]{0.66\textwidth} 
```

## Preview

Before describing each section, let's have a look at the final result
![preview](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/6szg8kayl7j3dqwvyssc.png)

## # Name Section

This is a command that takes 2 parameters: first name and last name. The last name has a **thicker** font and uses the **accent** color.

```latex
\namesection{Alan}{Turing}
```

## # Skills

Here you want to list all your skills and additional information. As you can see in the preview, this column has several **sections**: Info, Education, Course Work, Skills, and Languages.

### \ Info

```latex
\section{Info}
```
Here we place general information: location, date of birth, contact information, **links**. I think having plain urls looks **pretty ugly** so I decided to follow the following format: `{domain}//{user_name}`. This way it's easier to have an idea of what the link is about. E.g.
```latex
\textbf{Dev.to://}\href{https://dev.to/protium}{protium}\\
```

### \ Education

```latex
\section{Education}
```
For this section I opted for the following format, where each entry is a `subsection`
```
{University Acronym}
{University Name}
{Degree}
{Year} | {State, Country}
```
E.g.
```latex
\subsection{FaMAF}
\location{National University Of Córdoba}
\descript{BSc. in Computer Science \\
BSc. in Physics}
\location{
2017-2019 | Córdoba, Argentina
}
```

### \ Course work

```latex
\section{Course Work}
```
A list of all the courses you have finished or certifications you have obtained so far. Here you want to add a link to your certificate if possible (Coursera, Udemy, EdX, etc). If there is no certificate you could add a link to the course syllabus.

### \ Skills

```latex
\section{Skills}
```
For this section, I wanted to list all the tools/languages I know and have experience with, for which I added different `\subsections`:

- **Programming:** all the languages I have experience with
- **Infrastructure:** all the infra tools I have experience with
- **Storage:** all the storage solutions I have experience with
- **Familiar With:** all the technologies I have used for personal projects or PoC at different companies.

### \ Languages

```latex
\section{Languages}
```
The last section is dedicated to the languages you speak, with information about your level. In my case I have used the [Common European Framework of Reference](https://europa.eu/europass/en/common-european-framework-reference). E.g.
```latex
\subsection{Languages}
\textbf{Spanish:} Native\\
\textbf{English:} C1\\
```

## # Work Experience

This is, of course, the main section of our resume. Over the years I learned that a good work experience description should provide the following information:
- Company Name and Website
- Your Position
- Month and year
- Location
- Very small description of the company/product
- What where your main tasks/accomplishments in the company. (Here is the real deal so let's get into more details in the next section).
- **Tech Stack**: the company's tech stack. Be careful about not revealing **sensitive** information.

## # Describing your position at company X

I have seen a lot of resumes during my career and I think most of the people fail at describing what they've done while working at company X. So to make it easier, let's list what a  good description should have:
- **Achievements**: what you have achieved while working in company X? Did you create something amazing? As example, you could write: "I refactored the search algorithm which led to an improvement of 70% in performance". It must be something you feel **proud** about.
- What tasks did you **enjoy** at this position? "I created a PoC to add `rust` to our event processor"; "I created new tools for automatize deployments"
- Some **trivial tasks**: "Prepared migration from Vue to React". Maybe you didn't enjoy these tasks but they were part of your tasks at company X.

E.g.
```latex
\runsubsection{\href{https://cool-00.example/}{Cool Company 00}}
\descript{| Senior Software Engineer}
\location{\ello{\textbf{Aug 2021 – Present} | Munich, Germany | Cool platform}}
\vspace{\topsep}
\begin{tightemize}
\item Developed a cool algorithm that increased the speed of transactions by 70\%
\item Migrated cloud to AWS
\item {\bf Tech Stack:} NodeJS, ReactJS, Typescript, JWT, Web Sockets, Jest, ExpressJS, Go, RabbitMQ, Temporal, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, GCloud, Github Actions, Argo CD, Sentry\newline
\end{tightemize}
```

## # Fonts

Ideally, you want to choose fonts that are easy to read and do not look too **fancy**. For this project I have used 2 [google fonts](https://fonts.google.com/) in order to:
- have a **geek** font for the Skills, locations, positions.
- have a "normal" font for the jobs descriptions.

You can easily change these fonts in the `resume.cls` file.
```latex
\setmainfont[Color=primary, Path = fonts/maven-pro/, BoldFont=MavenPro-SemiBold]{MavenPro-Regular}
```

## # Colors

Colors are defined as follow
```latex
\definecolor{primary}{HTML}{2b2b2b} 
\definecolor{headings}{HTML}{6A6A6A}
\definecolor{subheadings}{HTML}{333333}
\definecolor{links}{HTML}{33AFFF}
```
Note that `links` is our **accent** color.

That's it!
This post ended up being longer than I expected. I hope you found something useful here and I'm looking forward to see your customizations!

:alien:

{% github protiumx/dev.resume %}