YAMLResume v0.6: Section Customization

YAMLResume v0.6 is here, and it brings two powerful features for customizing your resume's structure: section aliases and section reorder. These features allow you to rename section titles and control their sequence in the final PDF, giving you greater flexibility to tailor your resume.

Let's dive into how they work.

Section Aliases

The default section titles in YAMLResume (e.g., education, work) are automatically translated based on your chosen locale language. However, you might prefer a different title. For instance, you might want to change "Work" to "Professional Experience" for the work section.

To define aliases, use the layout.sections.aliases map in your resume.yml.

resume.yml

---
content:
  # ...

layout:                               
  sections:                           
    aliases:                          
      work: Professional Experience
      education: Academic Background
      skills: Technical Skills

Section Reordering

By default, sections are rendered in a standard order. The layout.sections.order feature lets you change this sequence to highlight your most important information first.

For example, to place your "Skills" and "Projects" sections before your "Work" experience, you can define the order like this:

resume.yml

---
content:
  # ...

layout:           
  sections:       
    order:        
      - skills
      - projects
      - work

Sections in the order list will appear first, followed by the remaining sections in their default order.

Putting It All Together: A Complete Example

Let's create a one-page resume that uses both features. We will alias and reorder some sections at the same time.

resume.yml

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://yamlresume.dev/schema.json

---

layout:
  sections:                          
    aliases:                         
      work: Professional Experience
      education: Academic Background
      skills: Technical Skills
    order:                           
      - basics
      - work
      - education
      - skills
  template: moderncv-banking
  typography:
    fontSize: 11pt

content:
  basics:
    name: Jane Doe
    headline: Senior Software Engineer
    email: jane.doe@example.com
    phone: "555-123-4567"
    summary: |
      A passionate and experienced software engineer with a proven track record
      of designing, developing, and deploying robust web applications. Skilled
      in both front-end and back-end development, with a keen eye for detail and
      a dedication to writing clean, efficient code.
  education:
    - institution: Tech University
      area: Software Engineering
      degree: Master
      startDate: 2018-09-01
      endDate: 2020-06-01
      summary: Specialized in distributed systems and cloud computing.
    - institution: State University
      area: Computer Science
      degree: Bachelor
      startDate: 2014-09-01
      endDate: 2018-06-01
      summary: |
        - Graduated with honors.
        - Focused on algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems.
      courses:
        - Data Structures & Algorithms
        - Operating Systems
        - Computer Networks
        - Database Systems
  work:
    - name: Tech Solutions Inc.
      position: Senior Software Engineer
      startDate: 2020-07-01
      summary: |
        - Led the development of a new microservices-based architecture, improving system scalability and reliability.
        - Mentored junior engineers, providing guidance on best practices and code quality.
        - Optimized application performance, reducing API response times by 30%.
    - name: Innovate Corp.
      position: Software Engineer
      startDate: 2018-07-01
      endDate: 2020-06-30
      summary: |
        - Developed and maintained features for a large-scale e-commerce platform using React and Node.js.
        - Collaborated with product managers and designers to deliver high-quality user experiences.
        - Participated in on-call rotation to ensure application stability.
    - name: Data Systems LLC
      position: Software Engineer Intern
      startDate: 2017-06-01
      endDate: 2017-08-31
      summary: |
        - Assisted in the development of a data processing pipeline.
        - Wrote unit tests to ensure code quality.
        - Gained experience with Agile development methodologies.
  skills:
    - name: Programming Languages
      level: Expert
      keywords:
        - JavaScript (ES6+)
        - TypeScript
        - Python
        - Go
    - name: Technologies & Frameworks
      level: Advanced
      keywords:
        - React
        - Node.js
        - Express
        - Docker
        - Kubernetes
        - PostgreSQL
    - name: Developer Tools
      level: Advanced
      keywords:
        - Git & GitHub
        - Webpack
        - Jest
        - CircleCI
  languages:
    - language: English
      fluency: Native or Bilingual Proficiency
    - language: Spanish
      fluency: Limited Working Proficiency

Here we alias the work, education, and skills sections, and reorder the sections by assigning higher priority to work than education, followed by the skills section:

Now, let's build the resume:

yamlresume build resume.yml

You will get a PDF file with the following content—I highlighted the sections with customizations:

Section Customization

Great, it works as expected! Isn't this cool?

In Summary

With section aliases and reordering, you now have fine-grained control over your resume's structure. We hope these features help you create even more personalized and effective resumes.

The best part of section customization is that you can always extend YAMLResume's i18n capabilities to support more languages on your own. By default, the default section titles will be translated to the target locale language (set via layout.locale.language) automatically. However, there are always cases where YAMLResume hasn't supported your target language yet, so you can override the default section titles with your own.

Meanwhile, people with different backgrounds have different preferences for the section order. For example, candidates looking for an industry job may order work in front of education, while postdoc researchers looking for an academic position would order education in front of work.

Hope you enjoy these new features!