1000 Stars

YAMLResume just crossed a huge milestone: 1000 GitHub stars—roughly half a year after open sourcing the project. Thank you for every star, issue, discussion, contribution, and word-of-mouth share. It's a small badge, but one that reflects real momentum for "resume as code", great typesetting, and a developer-first workflow.

In June we celebrated 500 stars, today we're back with 1000. In between, YAMLResume matured significantly—especially across three releases that many of you followed and adopted quickly: v0.5, v0.6, and v0.7. This post recaps the most important things we shipped, then lays out a pragmatic roadmap for the next leg of the journey.

Recap

v0.5: The Resume Compiler you can trust

v0.5 reframed YAMLResume not just as a formatter, but as a compiler. That single conceptual shift—treating a resume YAML like source code—unlocked correctness, consistency, and a brutally simple CLI workflow.

Key ideas we shipped in v0.5:

• Compiler architecture and standard data model: We formalized the resume structure so any downstream renderer or template gets clean, predictable data. This reduced footguns and improved template portability.
• Strong validation at two levels: JSON Schema for editor integration (auto-completion, hover docs, early format checks) and Zod for runtime safety and detailed diagnostics. Editors feel smart; builds feel safe.
• New commands that shorten loops: yamlresume validate for quick checks, and improved build that always validates first. With the --no-validate opt-out, you stay in motion during big edits.
• Clang-style error output: Clear errors tied to filenames and lines save minutes for every iteration.

v0.5 made YAMLResume a tool you can trust—even under deadlines. If you haven't yet, skim the examples and videos in the v0.5 blog; they show the validator, schema hints, and diagnostics in action.

v0.6: Section customization that matches how you tell your story

v0.6 focused on something deceptively simple but incredibly powerful: expressing your narrative in your own voice and order, without forking templates or hacking LaTeX.

What shipped:

• Section aliases: Rename canonical sections (e.g., turn work into "Professional Experience," education into "Academic Background") using layout.sections.aliases. This is especially useful for tone, region/culture, or role targeting.
• Section reordering: Bring the most relevant sections to the top with layout.sections.order. Put skills ahead of work, or surface projects first for portfolio-heavy roles.
• Practical resilience: Improvements like tolerating invalid dates (falling back to strings)

Why it matters:

• Hiring contexts differ. A PhD applying to a postdoc wants education first; a staff engineer wants work first. v0.6 puts that choice one YAML edit away.
• Language and tone shape perception. Aliasing lets you match industry norms ("Experience," "Selected Publications," "Open Source") without template surgery.

In short: v0.6 made YAMLResume adaptable to your narrative, not the other way around.

v0.7: Dev mode, because resumes deserve modern DX too

v0.7 shipped a watch-mode development flow that feels like hot reloading for resumes. Save your YAML, and the PDF rebuilds automatically. Small changes stop costing big context switches.

What shipped:

• yamlresume dev: A persistent process that watches your resume file and rebuilds on save. Pair it with a side-by-side PDF viewer for instant feedback.
• Robust watch internals: We adopted chokidar and added coalescing logic so we never storm builds on quick successive saves. Only one build at a time; the latest state always wins.
• Practical flags in dev: --no-pdf when you only need .tex for debugging, --no-validate during large refactors when speed matters most.

Why it matters:

• You iterate faster and write better.
• The tool takes the tedium, you keep the flow. That's the whole point of DX.

If you're used to npm run dev, you'll feel right at home.

YAMLResume with Homebrew

Last but not least, YAMLResume is now available on Homebrew:

brew install yamlresume

We've published a new blog post to explain how to use it in detail: YAMLResume Lands in Homebrew.

Looking ahead

YAMLResume has come a long way from the tiny core engine of PPResume to a powerful resume compiler today. But we still have lots of work to do to further enhance YAMLResume's capabilities and make it the ideal tool for resume crafting.

Multiple layouts

Right now YAMLResume only supports LaTeX output. We're going to extend the compiler-to-renderer pipeline to support multiple layout engines and output formats, starting with Markdown, then HTML.

Here are the features we're going to ship:

• Markdown output: A clean, structured Markdown artifact that mirrors your resume's sections and content. Useful for READMEs, job portals that accept Markdown, or handoffs to other resume builders that accept markdown.
• HTML output: HTML is the most popular output format for web resumes. The day YAMLResume supports HTML output, you can host your resume anywhere, share it with anyone and open it on any device.

One data model, many outputs. The compiler's validation remains the spine; renderers become plugins. You pick the output(s) per audience: PDF for formal submissions, HTML for web presence, Markdown for dev-facing channels.

GitHub Actions

Some people adopted YAMLResume to build and host their resumes on GitHub, each of them has their own workflow to generate PDF though.

We're going to ship an official GitHub YAMLResume action so that people can validate, build, host and publish their resume, without having to write their own workflow.

With a dedicated GitHub Action, updates become push-and-done.

More languages

YAMLResume v0.7 already supports English, Chinese, Norwegian and Spanish, we are going to expand the list to support more languages, making YAMLResume even more accessible to more people around the world.

French, German, Japanese will be the first batch of languages we're going to support in the next few months.

Regards

1000 stars is not an end but another start. It came from your early adoption, bug reports, language contributions, and thoughtful requests that shaped the roadmap. Thank you for your support and contributions.

Here's how to keep momentum going:

• Try the latest CLI: npm install -g yamlresume@latest or brew install yamlresume on macOS.
• Use dev mode for your next edit loop: yamlresume dev my-resume.yml.
• File issues and ideas: https://github.com/yamlresume/yamlresume/issues
• Join discussions: https://github.com/yamlresume/yamlresume/discussions

We'll keep shipping pragmatic features that make resume writing calmer, faster, and better-looking—while staying true to a single, validated source of truth. Onward to the next milestone.