Refactoring CV

I chose to build the website using a static site generator called Middleman. I chose this for a few reasons.

One, it uses Ruby, which is the programming language that I use on a daily basis and am used to.

Two, I find that relying on a CMS requires more effort for me than building things on my own.

Building things from scratch on my own however is turning out to be a little bit more work than I thought. Since I can't just apply a theme like I would if I used WordPress, I have to build design the website on my own.

I thought about writing the blog articles first, but I decided to finish the foundations of the website first before starting to write the blog articles and promoting the website.

I also am thinking about creating an email list. I don't have any tools that I can use to collect emails, so I will probably build that on my own as well.

The new website is uploaded, and while it's not finished, it's starting to take its form and looking more professional.

There was apparently a differentiation between the blog template and the regular template in middleman. So the way the blog was rendering vs the regular index pages weren't consistent.

I dug into the code a bit to render a blog template when the user is viewing an individual blog article and regular template when the user is viewing everything else. This will make everything much more easier to style and build later on.

I decided to document this on indiehackers. I had a previous indiehackers account from my last side project, RussianDict. So I just added a new product under my existing account and wrote a few updates of what I've done so far to start publishing my progress on indiehackers.

I wasn't sure how to work on this project. I could just go into work mode, come up with the course, and then launch it to see how it would do. But based on past experiences of doing this with various side projects that have failed, I decide against this.

I decide to do the following:

1. Build a basic website that will act as a website to sell the final course that I create as well as a blog to host free blog posts about writing effective software developer resumes.

2. Build a mailing list so that I can blast an email campaign once the course is launched.

3. Create Facebook and Twitter accounts and start building a following to help with sales when the product is launched.

4. Create the product page on indiehackers and journey the progress to keep myself accountable as well as try to build a following here as well.

As far as the actual progress made, I built and launched a bare-bones website. It is simple, built with middleman since it's a static website, and uses the middleman blog gem to publish the blog posts. It is hosted on a AWS S3 bucket. This seemed to be the most simple way to go about launching the website.

The web design is not done. That is what I'll be working on next.

I take a long walk during the COVID-19 madness just to get some fresh air after being trapped in the house all day, and I start thinking about different problems I can solve.

Randomly, I realize that a lot of my friends who are software developers (non-American devs) want to work with companies in the USA. Many send me their CV's and ask me for their feedback. And all of the CV's are not optimized for landing the initial interview. The CV's are too long, are not focused, and seem to try to impress with long words rather than focus on landing the first interview with targeted keywords.

This may be a cultural difference... however I do remember seeing some resumes from the USA, and many also suffer from the same problem. Grammar mistakes, irrelevant job experiences, and etc.

Getting a job is a numbers game. And in order to get a job, you have to interview as much as possible. Which means you want to land as many interviews as possible. To land an interview, you need a well polished CV.

I come up with the idea of creating a course to help software developers write better resumes to help them land their ideal jobs. I come up with the name "Refactoring CV" copying the naming convention of Adam Wathan's Refactoring UI and Ben Oreinstein's Refactoring Rails.