Tai Lam in Science

I made a résumé in LaTeX when I needed to apply for a job about 2 years ago, and it was not great. While it served its purpose, I wasn't happy with it when it came to long-term code upkeep. (I can't remember the source of the template for my first “real” résumé.) The template I chose at the time had weird quirks, and I told myself I'd tried to get a simpler template the next time I needed to make a CV/résumé.

Well, I got my head start on a maintainable résumé now. Better start now, while I have the time to properly component test everything.

I was sort of reminded of myself, back when I was writing my undergraduate research paper. I chose a previously created and known LaTeX environment for pseudocode. Initially, I believed the one I had chosen the environment that was easiest to use, but then it turned out that it didn't break over page breaks at all. I ended up manually creating page breaks in LaTeX to match the actual printed output in a WYSIWYG, which is not in line with the WYSIWYM mindset of LaTeX. (I will make sure that doesn't happen the next time I write a scientific paper.)

So, what's the difference? Armed with only my GrapheneOS phone, DuckDuckGo, and the Cromite browser; I only sifted through the first page of results.

First, I found an article from Baeldung, which is a website I've gotten some helpful Linux and programming related tips from. However, I found the final result to be like the New Age templates on Typst, which really just look like a very polished Microsoft Office résumé that most people would make (which isn't bad, but I really wanted to still use Computer Modern). Also, I'm not a fan of the numeric bar numbers for each skill you have. I've learned quite a number of (surprisingly) useful bits of knowledge from video games, but the numeric RPG-style skill tree progression isn't one of them.

Thanks for explaining each part of the LaTeX template, though.

Second, I found an article on LaTeX Tutorial about a minimalistic CV/résumé. It was getting closer to what I wanted (part of which included not moving too far away from the default Computer Modern font.

However, it changed the majority of the text (or at least used a non-default font type almost immediately in the preamble).

Maybe I would've chosen this if I was making this for my first real job outside of undergrad studies, but I felt I could do better.

The third and last was a CV/résumé template posted onto GitHub in October 2016.

As they say in vintage carnival contexts that are inspired by something out of Cuphead:

We have a winner!

This is the LaTeX file for the CV (with its corresponding PDF) and this is the LaTeX file for the résumé (with its corresponding PDF).

The last file needed is the style file.

I'm not sure why I was so successful now, compared to when I was finishing my undergrad studies — but I'll take it.