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cvsintellect | 11 years ago | on: The LaTeX cargo cult

May be specialized applications giving a WYSIWYG editor while using LaTeX in the background be useful? Like the one we have built: www.cvsintellect.com. Its a CV / Résumé builder built on LaTeX but the user does not need to know LaTeX.

cvsintellect | 12 years ago | on: Free online resume creator based on LaTeX

oops sorry for the premature reply. too much hap in a day :( a wysiwyg / rte is something we worked hard towards since that was the most easiest way to fill in data. we will have a closer look at it and get back.

cvsintellect | 12 years ago | on: Free online resume creator based on LaTeX

we have removed the restriction of popular email providers only. thank you for your feedback. its helping us get better! and also thank you for the list of temporary email providers, we used it to blacklist domains.

cvsintellect | 12 years ago | on: Free online resume creator based on LaTeX

yes. we realize that. currently you can configure it to DD/MM/YYYY, DD/MMM/YYYY, DD/<full month>/YYYY & choose to compute durations between dates. we will give more configurations soon. thank you for your time.

cvsintellect | 12 years ago | on: Free online resume creator based on LaTeX

We got a lot of feedback through our feedback form which sadly is anonymous. Though a lot of them were positive there was one particularly negative feedback. We thought it touched on a lot of important topics and we should respond to it. Since most of the traffic today has been from ycombinator we are putting it here hoping for the person to read. sentences starting with - is feedback recieved while >> is our response.

- Felt compelled to fill in "Personal" section, even though specifying Gender, DOB, Nationality is very unprofessional. Only because it is a section that cannot be removed, and became a Giant Bold "PERSONAL" at the bottom of my resume that was empty -- so if I can't remove it, I guess I better have -something- there ! >> agreed. have listed it as a bug to be fixed in next release! sorry for that.

- so then I fill in some hobbies, at least, and it won't wrap along the margins correctly, as though I shouldn't have so many interesting hobbies for these templates? Looks very bad when everything else does wrap, makes it look shoe-horned. >> agreed. the list of hobbies & languages are supposed to be small. if you need a full fledged hobbies / languages space you can create a custom section for it & list everything there :) as for wrapping. we will try to fix it.

- holding multiple positions and titles in a single company, as many as 4 in 3 years, and 3 in 3 years for the next job, I prefer to list them in descending chronological order under the same section, describing the various 'accomplishments' underneath as opposed to describing 4 different "jobs". - i had to forgoe this information, and instead list all 3 or 4 titles as a single sentance, comma-seperated, which word wraps with a hyphen and looks confusing. I guess I would have to pick my "favorite" title, and stick with it. >> agreed. will brainstorm on how we can fix this. how would you do this in linked-in? it would be another position right? we are asking this as we are trying to keep 1:1 compatibility with linkedin since that data will need to be copied in the same format here.

- No place, really, to list the "business unit" or "department" under which those titles were held. Both the titles and the department are far more telling about the employment history than any bulletpoint can say. - I would also have to add a comma, and a business unit/department, after "Company", if I wanted this information present. I do, it is very vital information, especially in a large corporation like $#!^, where discovering which dept. to contact for verifying employment would be impossible otherwise. >> agreed. we missed location of office & department in positions. will add them soon.

- A number of times 'preview' did not reflect what I had recently saved. I did notice the baloon tip to save the first time I changed templates. I'm very sure I saved it vigorously before preview. Feels like I'm hitting a server farm that isn't replicating quickly enough. >> we are on Google App Engine (GAE) with 3 idle instances & with auto scaling feature of GAE (best in class) this should not have been the case. But we went totally viral today! We will see what we can do about this.

- preferred page breaks on sections are needed, I don't like seeing a single bullet point on the top of page 2 describing something I did at a job on the bottom of page 1. I might be tempted to simply remove an accomplishment to make it break where I'd like! Only to decide against it, or other padding methods, because I decide on a different template or add or remove another line above it. >> agreed. we are brainstorming on pagebreaks & greater control on footers.

- Here I've avoided the privacy invasion of Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, and all of these other data mining whores, but just to provide you feedback I'm suddenly pushing data through Google anyway. Makes me consider where my data is actually stored -- an AWS cluster, a google app engine database? Now I'm going to have to go back, re-login, and anonymize my data I've provided you. sigh. >> we chose to store data on GAE since it provides the best security that can be provided. Its certainly much more than what a 2 member dev team can provide. as for the data, we promise not to share that data with anyone without your consent. is there anything more we can do in this regard?

- after completing the anonymizing of my information, as account deletion is not possible and it became evident that you do not store my data on servers that you own, and I cannot trust your third party cloud providers, esp. after reading your privacy policy, whoever mysteriously they may be. For this reason I would never store my resume with your service. You must assure me that your servers are physical equipment that you own, in a facility that is owned and operated by a legitimate business with an address and phone number that a human is known to answer now and then, not some lowest-cost cloud provider. >> we are on cloud. (GAE & AWS to be more specific) and we are there not because they are cheap. they do cost quiet some money! we chose them because we think they actually can provide much more security, reliability & performance that a small dev team can with an owned instance of sever & database. we would surely think of having our own server, database etc. when we actually can afford them.

- Nobody likes seeing &amp; in their resume when editing. It looks like it decodes correctly in preview, but why should we have to be confused by it in editing? As software engineer, I feel compelled to correct it each time -- it frightens me that it could become doubly-escaped, becoming &amp;&amp; later when I'm not looking, when the & in &amp; gets re-encoded again sometime later, and make me look like a real idiot to a prospective employer. >> agreed. will add that as a bug to be fixed in next release.

- I would not pay for your service: #1: Privacy and #2 Templating issues (described in previous feedback) -- my own resume made in MS Word simply looks much better. >> have a look at some samples made on our site: http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-resumes/Modern.p... http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-resumes/Leadersh... http://www.cvsintellect.com/img/home/sample-resumes/Euro.pdf and if you prove us your similar looking template on word doc is better after print we will shutdown the service. period.

- I would recommend your service to others: who don't really care about who has their address, phone number, date of birth stored on some-random-harddisk, and have a very difficult time in MS Word. When I worked as a tutor in a college, I assisted at least 100 students with their resumes each quarter -- you would want to consider advertising in such spaces, though many would be inaccessible by you by their tax-funded nature: Workplace placement programs and libraries, for instance. >> yes students are our first goto market since they would be our early adopters. we are thinking on how we can reach them.

- I would actually pay for your service if you did anything more useful than templating (and the formatting and limitations previously mentioned were resolved). For instance: providing shorthand.com/firstname-lastname URL's for a web version, exporting to .doc, and finishing out the many unfinished concepts already here. >> yes. we know you would not pay for the currently running software online. and thats why its free :) we have premium templates & public resumes in our roadmap. but we are still thinking on a path to choose.

- Your pintrist referral link at the bottom just makes you look like a cheap, cheap, attention-seeking whore. >> yes. sadly we are in attention seeking mode right now & we would not make any balls about it. we have worked on this for a year now & we think it can serve the people for good. we want it to reach as many eyeballs as possible and get as many feedbacks as possible.

Thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Hope this reply makes you feel much better about the whole thing :)

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