500 Stars - YAMLResume

YAMLResume has achieved a significant milestone—500 stars on GitHub in just about a month.

YAMLResume 500 stars

Here is the timeline:

Mar 29: Decided to open source the engine behind PPResume
Apr 2: Got a local CLI demo
Apr 10: Achieved 100% test coverage
Apr 25: Got a local npm package
May 8: Officially open sourced yamlresume
May 17: Reached 200 stars
May 23: Reached 300 stars
May 30: Reached 400 stars
Jun 11: Reached 500 stars

In the meantime, we received our first pull request, merged another pull request, and addressed our first bug report. Special thanks to @jizusun, @koo6666, and @luyuhuang for your kind contributions!

Why Open Source?

The first line of code for YAMLResume was actually written in 2023. It began as the core typesetting engine for PPResume—a LaTeX-based, commercial, pixel-perfect resume builder that has already helped thousands of people create beautifully typeset resumes.

While I am not ready to open source PPResume itself, I do want to give users full control over their resumes. In December 2024, PPResume enabled users to download the generated LaTeX code for their resumes, ensuring our no vendor lock-in promise and giving users complete ownership of their data.

Moreover, the development of PPResume has greatly benefited from the open source community. I have learned a lot from it myself, and now it is time to give back.

There are very few open source tools that use YAML as a resume format. JSON Resume is a good try—as we all know, YAML is a superset of JSON. However, JSON Resume does not provide an opinionated solution for resume typesetting, layout, or output, making it far less practical. YAML, on the other hand, is a much better choice than JSON for resume formatting.

Open sourcing YAMLResume was clearly the right decision. Check out the download trends for YAMLResume on NPM:

YAMLResume NPM Download Trends May-Jun
2025

What's Next?

Although YAMLResume has been used by a commercial resume builder for almost two years, it is still in the early stages of development, and there is much more to be done.

Docker support was one of the most requested features, and I am pleased to say it is now available.

Another important feature is data validation. Unlike PPResume, which provides a carefully crafted and designed form for users to fill out and validate their resume data, YAMLResume accepts unconstrained input—any .yaml file. We must provide a way to validate input to ensure the program handles all forms of input gracefully.

Feature-wise, we plan to support section aliases and section reordering, making the PDF output more adaptable and flexible.

For developer experience, we aim to support a dev sub-command so users can modify resumes and see PDF changes in near real time.

Finally, some users have raised concerns about ATS compatibility. We are committed to ensuring that the PDF output is ATS compatible.

Stay tuned!