fun with man pages

back in my unix sysadmin days, before job searches and changing jobs were so easy, people actually had to read your resume… no scanners or automation. Back then, your resume had to look different. It had to catch the eye of some person flipping through a stack (a relative term that was much smaller then that it is now). People used different paper stock, different colors, and arranged the content to be eye catching.

I was a unix sysadmin looking for a linux sysadmin job. Why not make my resume look like something that the technical hiring manager might recognize? I created a ‘manpage’ resume.

Maybe I was just young? Perhaps I wasn’t yet a great sysadmin (after all these years, I have learned to not use words to embellis - no great, no expert - I mean, why raise that bar too high?) Okay, I’m going to go with young. I did not know how to generate manpages. Hmm, partially true. I knew there was roff. and several derivatives that specifically printed to certain devices - terminals, printers, etc. I knew there existed different macro packages… but I really didn’t have to create my own man pages.. so I did not.

I simply ‘stole’ the format from one man page… and used it to create my resume. It wworked well. It was pretty well noticed, and it seemed that many people would make comments. It worked… I got noticed!

do formatted, pretty resumes still matter?

This is a good question, reseved for another time and place. I say no. I also say that what you write does not really matter either as long as some resume search engine can find the subset of words and skills and pull out your resume (yeah, there still is that final mile of getting from ’noticed’ to interview)

Anyway, as with most things I do, modernizing the process and my resume, and using manpages is more just idle amusement for me. Not because I think it would get me noticed these days. But hey, it is a skill, why not put it to good use?

A Shameless plug

I am just showing a portion of the resume I created as a manpage. Always feel free to contact me if the company is good, the team is great, the money is okay, but make sure the technology is amazing!

What I did not realize back then was that those macro packages really make things easy and allow for automation and templates. Now it is quite easy to add or modify the document and the formatting is already done for you. Inserting skills or adding headers is just an inserting into the template at the correct point.

The template is a roff template and to generate a new version of the document is just running the template through nroff, or groff, or troff…

Being the unix sysadmin, it gets easier. I use a makefile that knows how to build the pdf and the html and to clean up the environment and also push the new version to github.

Summary

Have questions or want to share your own sysadmin story? Leave a comment below!

(I will set up comments eventually ;)