I started read.cv when transitioning from full time to freelance design in July. I wanted an easy to update 'about me' page to link from my website and bio – something simpler than LinkedIn and more dynamic than a PDF.
Design wise I focused on legibility and tried to give projects/side projects equal weight to things like education and work experience. A few unique features: tagging collaborators in your experiences, status updates, and print optimized profiles.
It took me around three months (Sept to November) to get it out the door, and I've been working on making improvements since. Open to any questions or feedback!
Different domain locations have different rules. For example, if you want to get a .sg domain, you need a Singapore entity. If you want a .aero domain, you need to show you're an aerospace business to the registrar.
I tried doing it through 101domain.com and couldn't because I didn't have a registered business in Cape Verde. I tried again using Marcaria.com and they handled the registration process and I haven't had any issues so far.
Are you sure about that? Appears to me that you need a registered trademark in Cape Verde, which Marcaria also has a process for (costs a lot and takes up to a year). I'm fairly certain your domain will expire within three months after purchase without a valid trademark certificate.
Hey Andy, good job! The app looks really clean and nice to navigate through.
I just wanted to share a couple of "views" that I created to express my career in a different way. I'm sharing just for your inspiration. (content in Portuguese, but I bet you can auto translate it)
I just want to say this is a fantastic idea, and as another commenter said, it would be great to eat linkedin's lunch.
My only feedback I guess would be to make same wish I make about just about any project these days, which is compatibility with activitypub. Do you have thoughts on the promise of a project like this to work on that kind of protocol?
> Design wise I focused on legibility and tried to give projects/side projects equal weight to things like education and work experience. A few unique features: tagging collaborators in your experiences, status updates, and print optimized profiles.
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I think your definition of legibility is maybe a bit off, the font is too small to be considered legible by any accessibility standard. I have 20/20 vision but I struggle to read some of it. The color contrast is also failing in some cases, and since the font is so small and thin, the contrast needs to be increased above what color contrast would suggest.
Also, when I wanted to check the size of the font (which is set at 14px but that seems equivalent to 11-12px for the common fonts like Arial) I realized I can't actually select any of the text, which I think might be important a website like this. You are creating some mask with a different div that might be blocking the clicks. You can create a mask like that with simpler html and css that won't have a problem with clicks.
Otherwise it's a nice project and it looks like you got a good traction already. I hope this helps.
Right, so I read a bit further and saw a comment about the view example button, which took me to the proper cv. So my comment isn't completely accurate, haha.
I would love to be able to embed the CV into a personal page so that it could link to the full profile on your site. I could picture it being the perfect link between a social network and private content.
1. As others have pointed out, the default font size is way, way too small. Not readable on a phone, barely on a computer monitor.
2. Please try your site on an oldish iPhone, like an iPhone 7, in landscape mode. You give about 2cm of space for the scrolling content. The problem seems to be keeping the "View example" button anchored on the bottom of the screen at all times, with a large fixed border around the button. This leaves no room for the actual content. When you actually click "View example," the resulting page renders fine on a landscape iPhone.
3. Please try your site on a large 27" monitor in full screen mode. Your content's width is a fixed number of pixels and you end up rendered on a tiny sliver (about 1/5) centered horizontally on the screen. Please don't be one of those sites that has huge horizontal whitespace margins (I'm looking at you, John Gruber). It's a terrible web trope. Consider using the whole width of the browser window, or most of it.
4. I also agree that headshot photos should not be part of this product. Dare to be actually different from LinkedIn.
Please post here again after some iteration, this thing has promise.
Some feedback from a random internet person, take it with a fistful of salt.
Why are there non-functioning arrows next to the names of projects, companies, etc.?
Why does it keep randomly re-rendering while I'm trying to read something?
The design is, no doubt to some people, gorgeous, but I'm finding the landing page example completely unusable. If it's intended to show off capability then it needs to be clear that that's the purpose. If it's intended to be usable then it needs to be re-thought.
(Later)
Ah, when I go to an actual example then the arrow isn't functional, but the text on which the arrow is placed, is a link.
My reaction ... I don't want it to be discoverable, requiring exploration to work out the functionality. I want it to be immediately obvious, using existing internet norms. If I visit for the purpose of looking at a CV I don't want to have to learn how to use the site, I want to get the information I'm looking for.
Thanks for the feedback! As you mentioned the arrows indicate that the project is an outbound link (links are optional so having a visual indication that something is linked was necessary, though there are certainly other ways this could be achieved).
Pages subscribe to updates in real time, so I think you just so happened to be viewing a profile as it was being edited. Seems like live updates should probably only be on for the editor.
As for the landing page I'm hoping to redo this in general. As a quick first version I just embedded an actual profile so I wouldn't have to update image assets as the design changed, but I can see how this approach is confusing.
(unsolicited) Feedback: Why are there other people on my CV? Who are they to begin with? And when a recruiter is looking at my CV, I don't want them clicking on other people.
The idea is that you're able to (optionally) tag coworkers and collaborators in your work experience and projects. Although this doesn't track 1:1 with the traditional CV use case, it felt like a great way to celebrate the people you work with and create lightweight endorsements.
If you choose to print or save your profile as a PDF these tags are hidden automatically, making it much more of a traditional CV, appropriate for job applications etc.
Just riffing off some ideas for the 'coworkers and collaborators' section as well since I agree that I wouldn't find it useful as a sometimes-recruiter in its current state.
I think the section could do with some more structure or information given. E.g. instead of just loose association with other folks who work at the same company, break associations into 'reports to', 'close teammates', 'manages' (or make that information visible on hover or something). There's probably a pretty cool hierarchical way to show this information but maybe people would find that too invasive. As someone who conducts interviews pretty often, understanding a person's team structure would definitely be useful, and would still serve the 'social proof' function you've described.
The collaborator's title while they were involved with that specific project might also make it easier to parse what the working relationship was between the CV owner and the collaborator as well.
I actually really like the concept of naming collaborators. Most great work is done in teams. Either through sparring or checking. The individualistic view on cvs does injustice to the complex dynamics of teams and performers.
Congrats on the launch. Overall it's really clean and I like the design.
Some quick feedback, which you can take with a grain of salt:
* I was confused by the image CV on the homepage. It expected it to be clickable, and it took me a minute to find the View Demo button.
* I love the collaborators feature. IMO this is one the biggest missing factors of LinkedIn (e.g. who did you actually work with on a small team)
* It would be nice to be able to customize the invite message when inviting a collaborator.
* The Create a Profile button on the homepage doesn't user cursor: pointer, which made me miss that it was the sign up button at first glance.
* It looks like most of the links don't have cursor: pointer, which feels off to me
* Once I saved my profile, it took me a minute to find the edit button in the bottom left
Overall, nice working and I'm looking forward to following the updates. Also, great first name you have there.
Thank you fellow Andy — Hear you about the homepage, hoping to completely redo it soon and create more abstracted visuals. In terms of the pointer, my current logic is to use cursor: pointer on anything that visually looks like a link (e.g. unstyled text), and to leave it as default for components that have a visual affordance that they are clickable (e.g. buttons or tabs). I realize this might not be the most web-like convention though - might be worth it to just move all clickable components to the pointer cursor.
Yes please; personally, I've had couple of decades of training and habits that a change in cursor indicates clickability; without my cursor changing, it feels like a static image, not interactive page.
> my current logic is to use cursor: pointer on anything that visually looks like a link (e.g. unstyled text), and to leave it as default for components that have a visual affordance that they are clickable (e.g. buttons or tabs). I realize this might not be the most web-like convention though - might be worth it to just move all clickable components to the pointer cursor.
The cursor isn't the only problem. The way you present the screenshot fundamentally looks like a functional profile. It isn't just that the links look like links but aren't clickable. Text also isn't selectable. In general, it's in the uncanny valley that feels really uncomfortable. Consider making it look very obviously like a sample screenshot: caption it at the top, move it to the side beside (rather than above) the explanation of the site, layer a couple of profiles atop each other so they look like "sheets", or similar. Those would help trip people's "ah, it's a sample screenshot" pattern recognition.
+1 about cursor: pointer. I also noticed that the text inside at least the top button can be highlighted when clicking. You can disable that with user-select: none;
Great idea and execution! I personally find the white space excessive and it's made more obvious on print. Unless someone is name dropping companies, I would expect a resume to have a lot more information in a higher density view. A cool idea would be to replace the facepile with various icons with numbers next to it to show quantified metrics that were accomplishments of various positions/projects ($X rev/# commits/# users/etc.)
Apologies for being off topic, but the side project you link - https://andychung.me/self-portrait - is absolutely awesome. Runs like butter in the browser and I absolutely love the art style.
Absolutely buttery smooth in my (non Chrome/Chromium) mobile browser.
Brilliant!
If anyone wonders: there has been so many somewhat interesting websites lately that only works in Chrome that it is well worth pointing out when something just works.
I haven't implemented gestures to open the sidebar yet unfortunately - currently to close the sidebar on mobile either tap the right edge of the screen (the sliver of the detail), or tap a navigation item in the sidebar.
My feedback is that the collaborators aren't very useful to me. As in, I get 10+ tiny unrecognizable face icons and a name if I hover over them. There's no way to a see a list of collaborators and their one sentence blurbs for a specific project. Not even sure if shared collaborators are highlighted if you're logged in yourself or not.
I would like it if the collaborators were in a cluster on the right of the Company name, rather than inline. It would make it more clear that this is a related concept.
As you eyes go down the left side of the page you would read contiguous CV info, supporting information would be a little more segregated to the right.
One piece of feedback, I almost missed the contact information at the bottom of the profile. Any chance of having a preferred contact at the top so it's harder to miss?
- no support for company lookup/reference (need to build company DB and connect the social graphs, this is why Linkedin is so valuable/has a moat i.e. your biggest challenge.)
- No ability to add a custom section to my profile.
- I would like to add things non-work related like music i'm listening to, books I'm reading etc...
- The above makes things more personal, but I would go even further the more intimate the better IMO. Work is personal.
Have definitely been thinking about how to make sections more customizable as I'll never be able to make the defaults cover every use case. What bugs are you encountering?
perhaps you could implement a simple feedback/bug report button so that people can send it in in context. i like encouraging using Loom too, since its free
This is visually very attractive. Have you considered supporting uploading structured resume formats like FRESH?
Edit: also I want to emphasize the fact that this looks great on mobile, which isn’t something I always expect in this space. That said I’d consider bumping up the text size a bit (or allowing users to do so for their own profile).
In Europe, you'll never impress anyone with Europass, but you're highly unlikely not screw anything up.
It is well structured, people know what to expect, it's machine readable... Personally, I like it a lot, as opposed to some flashy website PDF that an applicant thinks it's amazing, but it takes me extra 30s to find a piece of data on it.
This is a good suggestion. If I've already gone to the trouble to make a machine-readable resume, it would be nice to at least seed my CV with the data from that file.
I haven't heard of FRESH before, but I'll certainly look into it. Filling out a CV is a chore and anything I can do to make it easier for people would be great.
It might also help you refine your data model to use other structured standards as a reference. It’s helped me think about building my own personal site presentation.
I was wondering about the existence of structured resume formats, so thank you for this random piece of knowledge in a place I did not expect to find it.
For real. I've been wishing for such a format for years. Now if I find myself applying for jobs, I can sneer derisively at places that don't support any of these, and then grudgingly apply for them manually anyway.
There are 27 photos at the bottom on mobile? Who are these people? If these are example profiles I would try to get a more diverse and inclusive grouping. There is not a woman in the 27 and ideally it would be 50/50
Nothing bizarre about it; Diverse viewpoints tend to strengthen a community, so considering it unfortunate that HN doesn't benefit from a broader demographic distribution is pretty defensible.
By that logic, it would be sensible to lament that, say, a particular daycare is staffed entirely by women, or that a particular ice hockey team is made up entirely of white men. Sometimes groups of humans coalesce these ways, and there’s nothing wrong or unfortunate about it. No intervention requested or required.
If you want to champion diversity of viewpoints, that’s a different matter entirely, and such conditions may be desirable, depending on the wants & needs of the group in question.
Take these things on a case-by-case basis. Don’t reach for top-down governance as a panacea when such a thing is neither requested nor required.
> By that logic, it would be sensible to lament that, say, a particular daycare is staffed entirely by women, or that
This is a non-sequitur; neither of those are communities in the sense under discussion.
I'll agree that there are some cases where a lack of diversity doesn't indicate any weakness in the community, but that is not the general case.
I don't know why you are bringing "intervention" into the discussion as I did not, nor did the OP. And who said anything about top-down governance? I noted only that the case for more diversity in HN is quite defensible, and it obviously is. NB I didn't claim it was correct, just defensible which is a pretty low bar.
So beyond "bizarre" being an overreach (ironically, verging on bizarre even before the ex post facto introduction of intervention, etc.), this is exactly the case-by-case you are asking for.
Yes to case-by-case, and in this case, Hacker News being a somewhat representative demographic of the Tech sector, it is rather unfortunate that it lacks the noted diversity.
It's not ok to suggest that the Tech sector, being one of the most important industries for gaining financial independence and making an impact on the world, must remain the white male bastion that it is.
You can’t force demographics. People are going to navigate to and participate in the things that interest them. There’s nothing unfortunate about that.
Maybe you’re really thinking about unnecessary gatekeeping or something? THAT is unfortunate.
But it’s vital to recognize the difference between these concepts. One is immoral, the other is not.
Sorry, I have to: we need more female construction workers for diversity. Most occupational deaths are male. We need to balance that scale. Do not we?! Sigh...
Does it make sense to speak about the composition of a group without understanding what the group membership represents?
Eg: what if that's the list of people who gave him financial support building it? What if it's his buddies from the Navy SEALS? Perhaps it's a list of sexual predators in his area? Should it still be 50/50…
Though I agree it's not clear what those pics on the bottom represent.
Nice work. Quick feedback. Instead of (or in addition to) using Google to authenticate could you use LinkedIn? That way the site could pull my information from LinkedIn instead of making me enter it again.
This is awesome! I’d recommend adding a section for certifications. I have a bunch of FAA certs that are career-relevant but they don’t fit naturally into any of the existing profile sections.
I’d also suggest making some of the fields wider. 24 characters for location isn’t going to be long enough, for example.
Agreed. And I can't fit my professional title within the character limit either. But that's probably more of a sign of a personal/professional problem than a bug... :)
I have been working on a similar project aimed at content creators - they also need their LinkedIn.
The idea is that you can build your Authentic Profile by connecting your social APIs. It’s called Authentic https://authenticstats.com and it’s growing fast. :)
So, in Safari on iOS 14, the view demo link brought me to a page that was mostly blank besides the name and picture. I turned on a screen recording to capture the bug, but then was unable to reproduce it (started the recording on this page and followed the link again.) I should have thought to screenshot the page before doing so, oh well! Maybe it was due to a failed XHR request for the profile data, if the pages are being rendered client-side.
Vs. LinkedIn: I started using it in 2009, but it's become virtually unusable for me. The only reason I haven't deleted my account is it has up to date contact information for my 1,300 LinkedIn connections.
369 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadDesign wise I focused on legibility and tried to give projects/side projects equal weight to things like education and work experience. A few unique features: tagging collaborators in your experiences, status updates, and print optimized profiles.
It took me around three months (Sept to November) to get it out the door, and I've been working on making improvements since. Open to any questions or feedback!
I just wanted to share a couple of "views" that I created to express my career in a different way. I'm sharing just for your inspiration. (content in Portuguese, but I bet you can auto translate it)
Experience view; years of experience per theme/subject. https://rodolphoarruda.pro.br/experiencia/
Projects & cultural context in chronological order (notice the flags) https://rodolphoarruda.pro.br/eu/lista-de-projetos/
I decided to make those views available because I stopped believing the standard CV/LinkedIn format for presenting myself and my career.
Cheers and keep up the great work!
My only feedback I guess would be to make same wish I make about just about any project these days, which is compatibility with activitypub. Do you have thoughts on the promise of a project like this to work on that kind of protocol?
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I think your definition of legibility is maybe a bit off, the font is too small to be considered legible by any accessibility standard. I have 20/20 vision but I struggle to read some of it. The color contrast is also failing in some cases, and since the font is so small and thin, the contrast needs to be increased above what color contrast would suggest.
Also, when I wanted to check the size of the font (which is set at 14px but that seems equivalent to 11-12px for the common fonts like Arial) I realized I can't actually select any of the text, which I think might be important a website like this. You are creating some mask with a different div that might be blocking the clicks. You can create a mask like that with simpler html and css that won't have a problem with clicks.
Otherwise it's a nice project and it looks like you got a good traction already. I hope this helps.
2. Please try your site on an oldish iPhone, like an iPhone 7, in landscape mode. You give about 2cm of space for the scrolling content. The problem seems to be keeping the "View example" button anchored on the bottom of the screen at all times, with a large fixed border around the button. This leaves no room for the actual content. When you actually click "View example," the resulting page renders fine on a landscape iPhone.
3. Please try your site on a large 27" monitor in full screen mode. Your content's width is a fixed number of pixels and you end up rendered on a tiny sliver (about 1/5) centered horizontally on the screen. Please don't be one of those sites that has huge horizontal whitespace margins (I'm looking at you, John Gruber). It's a terrible web trope. Consider using the whole width of the browser window, or most of it.
4. I also agree that headshot photos should not be part of this product. Dare to be actually different from LinkedIn.
Please post here again after some iteration, this thing has promise.
Why are there non-functioning arrows next to the names of projects, companies, etc.?
Why does it keep randomly re-rendering while I'm trying to read something?
The design is, no doubt to some people, gorgeous, but I'm finding the landing page example completely unusable. If it's intended to show off capability then it needs to be clear that that's the purpose. If it's intended to be usable then it needs to be re-thought.
(Later)
Ah, when I go to an actual example then the arrow isn't functional, but the text on which the arrow is placed, is a link.
My reaction ... I don't want it to be discoverable, requiring exploration to work out the functionality. I want it to be immediately obvious, using existing internet norms. If I visit for the purpose of looking at a CV I don't want to have to learn how to use the site, I want to get the information I'm looking for.
Pages subscribe to updates in real time, so I think you just so happened to be viewing a profile as it was being edited. Seems like live updates should probably only be on for the editor.
As for the landing page I'm hoping to redo this in general. As a quick first version I just embedded an actual profile so I wouldn't have to update image assets as the design changed, but I can see how this approach is confusing.
If you choose to print or save your profile as a PDF these tags are hidden automatically, making it much more of a traditional CV, appropriate for job applications etc.
Just riffing off some ideas for the 'coworkers and collaborators' section as well since I agree that I wouldn't find it useful as a sometimes-recruiter in its current state.
I think the section could do with some more structure or information given. E.g. instead of just loose association with other folks who work at the same company, break associations into 'reports to', 'close teammates', 'manages' (or make that information visible on hover or something). There's probably a pretty cool hierarchical way to show this information but maybe people would find that too invasive. As someone who conducts interviews pretty often, understanding a person's team structure would definitely be useful, and would still serve the 'social proof' function you've described.
The collaborator's title while they were involved with that specific project might also make it easier to parse what the working relationship was between the CV owner and the collaborator as well.
But most teams don't produce great work - it's all dependent on the team makeup, bringing it back around to individuals.
I wish I was on a great team again - they seem harder and harder to find.
Some quick feedback, which you can take with a grain of salt: * I was confused by the image CV on the homepage. It expected it to be clickable, and it took me a minute to find the View Demo button. * I love the collaborators feature. IMO this is one the biggest missing factors of LinkedIn (e.g. who did you actually work with on a small team) * It would be nice to be able to customize the invite message when inviting a collaborator. * The Create a Profile button on the homepage doesn't user cursor: pointer, which made me miss that it was the sign up button at first glance. * It looks like most of the links don't have cursor: pointer, which feels off to me * Once I saved my profile, it took me a minute to find the edit button in the bottom left
Overall, nice working and I'm looking forward to following the updates. Also, great first name you have there.
Otherwise, awesome sauce :)
The cursor isn't the only problem. The way you present the screenshot fundamentally looks like a functional profile. It isn't just that the links look like links but aren't clickable. Text also isn't selectable. In general, it's in the uncanny valley that feels really uncomfortable. Consider making it look very obviously like a sample screenshot: caption it at the top, move it to the side beside (rather than above) the explanation of the site, layer a couple of profiles atop each other so they look like "sheets", or similar. Those would help trip people's "ah, it's a sample screenshot" pattern recognition.
The only thing I'm missing is the Publications and Certifications section (had to create an award for the certs)
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/94265/whats-the-diffe....
Another option is to have the "view example" button visible even before the user scrolls.
Kudos to you!
Brilliant!
If anyone wonders: there has been so many somewhat interesting websites lately that only works in Chrome that it is well worth pointing out when something just works.
Remember resume.json spec that was on here a few years ago? Any plans to support that?
As you eyes go down the left side of the page you would read contiguous CV info, supporting information would be a little more segregated to the right.
I like the collaborator feature.
One piece of feedback, I almost missed the contact information at the bottom of the profile. Any chance of having a preferred contact at the top so it's harder to miss?
- projects and feature section.
- Simple clean design, easy to edit
- printable
Things I don't like
- Super buggy
- no support for company lookup/reference (need to build company DB and connect the social graphs, this is why Linkedin is so valuable/has a moat i.e. your biggest challenge.)
- No ability to add a custom section to my profile.
- I would like to add things non-work related like music i'm listening to, books I'm reading etc...
- The above makes things more personal, but I would go even further the more intimate the better IMO. Work is personal.
Edit: also I want to emphasize the fact that this looks great on mobile, which isn’t something I always expect in this space. That said I’d consider bumping up the text size a bit (or allowing users to do so for their own profile).
It is well structured, people know what to expect, it's machine readable... Personally, I like it a lot, as opposed to some flashy website PDF that an applicant thinks it's amazing, but it takes me extra 30s to find a piece of data on it.
I've never heard of this (FRESH), and am intrigued and interested. Would you kindly share some more info on this?
What a ridiculous culture we’ve built if this sentiment is widely accepted. Just bizarre.
If you want to champion diversity of viewpoints, that’s a different matter entirely, and such conditions may be desirable, depending on the wants & needs of the group in question.
Take these things on a case-by-case basis. Don’t reach for top-down governance as a panacea when such a thing is neither requested nor required.
This is a non-sequitur; neither of those are communities in the sense under discussion.
I'll agree that there are some cases where a lack of diversity doesn't indicate any weakness in the community, but that is not the general case.
I don't know why you are bringing "intervention" into the discussion as I did not, nor did the OP. And who said anything about top-down governance? I noted only that the case for more diversity in HN is quite defensible, and it obviously is. NB I didn't claim it was correct, just defensible which is a pretty low bar.
So beyond "bizarre" being an overreach (ironically, verging on bizarre even before the ex post facto introduction of intervention, etc.), this is exactly the case-by-case you are asking for.
Do you think that e.g. a forum about child-rearing populated almost entirely by women exhibits “a lack of diversity”?
It's not ok to suggest that the Tech sector, being one of the most important industries for gaining financial independence and making an impact on the world, must remain the white male bastion that it is.
Maybe you’re really thinking about unnecessary gatekeeping or something? THAT is unfortunate.
But it’s vital to recognize the difference between these concepts. One is immoral, the other is not.
Eg: what if that's the list of people who gave him financial support building it? What if it's his buddies from the Navy SEALS? Perhaps it's a list of sexual predators in his area? Should it still be 50/50…
Though I agree it's not clear what those pics on the bottom represent.
I’d also suggest making some of the fields wider. 24 characters for location isn’t going to be long enough, for example.
I have been working on a similar project aimed at content creators - they also need their LinkedIn. The idea is that you can build your Authentic Profile by connecting your social APIs. It’s called Authentic https://authenticstats.com and it’s growing fast. :)
Good luck with your project.
So, in Safari on iOS 14, the view demo link brought me to a page that was mostly blank besides the name and picture. I turned on a screen recording to capture the bug, but then was unable to reproduce it (started the recording on this page and followed the link again.) I should have thought to screenshot the page before doing so, oh well! Maybe it was due to a failed XHR request for the profile data, if the pages are being rendered client-side.
IE:
Why would I use this when I have a profile on LinkedIn?
Why would I use this when I could just put a resume up on my website?