My CV created using R

This CV is generated using the R package pagedown, which uses the JavaScript library paged.js. This allows creating a CV based on R Markdown using markdown and HTML making it very flexible.

In addition, this CV is based on pretty much all content being stored in a Google Sheet, thus separating content and styling.

Here’s an example of how my CV looks like:

Acknowledgements

This CV was created based on the datadrivencv R package.

Motivation

I wanted to update my CV, but editing a document/slide is quite a bit of manual work. That is especially as this can easily lead to re-formatting the whole file. I remembered that some people were doing CVs using Rmarkdown. On researching, I came across the datadrivencv package. That seemed like a great approach as it allows me to:

• Store the content in a file making it easy to edit.
• Change the style using CSS.
• Easily create HTML and PDF versions.
• The datadrivencv package creates the needed files based on templates. After that my CV does not depend on the package.
• Use R (I like using R).

Using it

Feel free to re use what I created. I made a bunch of customisations compared to what datadrivencv gives you. I’m planning to write a blog post about that on my blog https://gapthemind.info

You might fork my repo, copy my spreadhseet, fill it with your own data and with that render your own CV.

To help with reproducibility, this projects uses the R package renv to define the R packages and its versions. Use renv::restore() to restore the state of the project from renv.lock. See the package documentation for more details.

Format of spreadsheets

The data is stored in a Google Sheet

There are four spreadsheets of “data” that are used. These take the form of separate sub-sheets within a google sheet. The spreadsheets that are needed and their columns are (note: these are partly outdated, as I did some updates to move more deta from the R markdown file into the sheet):

entries

Column	Description
section	Where in your CV this entry belongs
title	Main title of the entry
loc	Location the entry occured
institution	Primary institution affiliation for entry
start	Start date of entry (year). Can be left blank for single point events like a manuscript.
end	End year of entry. Set to “current” if entry is still ongoing.
description_*	All description columns are pasted togehter. You can include markdown and html formatting in here. A cell starting with <exclude> is not considered.
in_resume	A filter variable that is used to decide if entry is in the resume.

skills

Column	Description
order	Order
category	Category of skill. Currently one of: technical, language, other_tech or attributes
skill	Name of skill
level_num	Relative numeric level of skill. Applies only to category “technical”
level_cat	Categorical level of skill. Applies only to categoriy “language”
in_resume	A filter variable that is used to decide if entry is in the resume.

text_blocks

Column	Description
loc	Id used for finding text block
text	Contents of text block. Supports markdown formatting.

contact_info

Column	Description
loc	Id of contact section
icon	Icon used from font-awesome 4 to label this contact section
contact	The actual value written for the contact entry
link	An optional link for the contact entry

Rendering your CV

Now that you have the templates setup and you’ve configured your data, the last thing to do is render. The easiest way to do this is by opening cv.rmd in RStudio and clicking the “Knit” button. This will render an HTML version of your CV. However, you most likely want a PDF version of your CV to go along with an HTML version. The easiest way to do this is to run the included script render_cv.r:

render_cv.r

This script will render your CV in HTML and output it as cv.html, it will also turn on the pdf_mode parameter in cv.rmd, which will strip the links out and place them at the end linked by inline superscripts. Once the pdf version is rendered to HTML, it will then turn that HTML into a PDF using pagedown::chrome_print(). By using this script you can easily make sure your get both versions rendered at the same time without having to manually go in and toggle the pdf mode parameter in the yaml header and then use the print dialog in your browser.