My Github Resume generates a résumé from your GitHub account

Résumés are becoming more and more useless, especially when it comes to programming jobs. Many prospective employees wish they could just send a link to their GitHub profile and be done with it. Many prospective employers wish they could just skim your GitHub profile and move on. Unfortunately, GitHub was never designed for such a purpose; that’s where My Github Résumé comes in.

The two-year-old service can automatically generate a résumé from anyone’s GitHub profile. Here’s an example of what one looks like: David Coallier (the creator of My Github Résumé).

The idea came to Coallier from a simple tweet:

When it comes to hiring, I’ll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.

— John Resig (@jeresig) February 5, 2011

From that, we got this:

As you can see, the generated résumé page includes text in the first person organized in five basic sections: Github Profile, Languages, My Popular Repositories, My Organizations, and About This Résumé. The last one is just a boiler plate that reads the same for everyone:

This résumé is generated automatically using information from my github account. The repositories are ordered by popularity based on a very simple popularity heuristic that defines the popularity of a repository by its sum of watchers and forks. Do not hesitate to visit my github page for more information about my repositories and work.

My Github Résumé may have been around for some time, but it still has a few areas to improve on. One issue is how the service handles being unable to find a given GitHub user (anyone can generate a résumé for any GiHub user). Here’s the error message:

We couldn’t find enough to build a résumé from. Make sure this is the good username :-). Try again with another username?

You can get this error in various browsers, such as Internet Explorer 9 or Chrome for Linux. As Brian Zeligson points out, this message blames the user, not the service. Here’s a better way of doing it:

We couldn’t find enough to build a résumé from. Make sure this is the good username :-). Try accessing the GitHub user account directly.

While this service isn’t new, there’s currently a great discussion about it brewing on Hacker News. As the top comment points out, much like other similar services, My Github Résumé only lists your own projects, not those from other people or organizations to which you contribute to.

The résumé isn’t going away anytime soon, but the popularity of this service, at least among developers, shows just how badly outdated the concept really is. Hopefully it will inspire even better alternatives to the annoying system that is the cover letter, résumé, and interview process.

Image credit: stock.xchng