Résumé Binary Protocol

Author: Morgan Conbere
Date: April 25, 2011

Purpose

In a former life, I spent a very long time tweaking the exact layout of my résumé, which was written in a very fragile LaTeX class. I enjoyed having the precise layout control that this method provided, but since then I have not spent as much time worrying about formatting text for printing.

Now I spend far more time thinking about how to format data for parsing. I thought that as a method of screening future potential employers, I would provide my résumé in a clearly defined format. Thus I present a well-defined protocol detailing my résumé, and the requisite tools to parse such a résumé.

Components

There are three primary components to this project, each in a separate directory.

• proto/ The protocol definition. The protocol adheres to the protobuf specification. It should be easily parsable by any protobuf library.

• src/cpp/ A command line tool that takes as input an encoded résumé buffer and outputs the text in markdown.

• mconbere/ An example résumé to inspect. The top level Makefile contains rules to turn the example textual protocol file into a binary protocol file as well as transforming it into Markdown. To build the Markdown example, run make mconbere/mconbere.md.

Proto

The protocol is documented inline. A good starting point is proto/Resume.proto.

Writing binary protobuf by hand would be an unpleasant endeavor. I instead have been taking advantage of the text format that protobuf allows. It is not well documented, but is simple enough to understand once you see an example. Here is a simple résumé:

name : "Morgan A. Conbere"
address : {
    line : "9641 Sunset Blvd."
    line : "Beverly Hills, CA 90210"
}
employment : {
    company : "Aperture Science, Inc."
    note : "Participated in testing"
    note : "Am still alive"
}
employment : {
    company : "Black Mesa"
    note : "Confidential"
}

To convert textual protobuf into binary protobuf, you must run it through protoc. For example:

protoc --encode=com.github.mconbere.Resume -Iproto proto/*.proto < MorganConbere.ptxt > MorganConbere.pb

Resume-gen-markdown

Binary résumé buffers can be turned into nicely human readable documents in one of two ways. First, it is possible to convert a binary buffer back into the textual format:

protoc --decode=com.github.mconbere.Resume -Iproto proto/*.proto < MorganConbere.pb 

Another option is converting the buffer into Markdown using the provided tool resume-gen-markdown. To build to tool, run make. Protobuf is the only dependency. See configure --help for more information about compilation options. Here is an example of producing mardown output from a binary buffer:

resume-gen-markdown < MorganConbere.pb > MorganConbere.md

Comments, Questions, and Bugs

If you have any comments, questions, or bug reports you may contact me directly at mconbere@gmail.com, or through github directly. Feel free to use this code in any way you wish.