Personal Website Housekeeping - Just a quick summary of my goals for this site/collection.
(1) Maintain a semblance of permanence on the web. Hopefully you can always find me here--even after projects culminate, or connections atrophy.
(2) Provide a home for my resume, samples, documentation, contributions and so on.
(3) Experiment, and remind myself why I love (and hate) being a professional web developer.
Resume -
Using the web for my resume seems like it would be pretty straight forward, but here's what I think is different about keeping a resume online.
A site gives you an address where someone can obtain your resume without all the stringency of old school synchronicity. For example, you can still send your resume,
or you can say, my resume is at such and such address on the web. True, if the address involves dots, dashes, and other web/url related ASCII madness this could be problematic.
Which is why you should grab an inexpensive domain with your name in it (like thomas.ballard.ws for example :-).
Or, if you value intelligence in a potential employer--it could also be a litmus test.
I'm just saying, sometimes when interviewing a company it can be tough to ascertain whether that technical film-i-ness is really just a corporate facade or regurgitated academia.
(...er, unless you are anticipating hiring me, then I'm sure it's a deep commitment to technology and scientific advancement, ...go good us'es! ;-)
More than a place to live, the web offers technology to enhance your resume. In past lives, when I've managed hiring, stacks of paper resumes get boring.
My suspicion (and I'd argue my own experience) is that given the dynamism of web technologies, a resume can point (or link) to samples which have a more profound and
immediate capability to "jump off the page". If this means a competitive advantage for you, then mission accomplished.
For modern professionals--those of us that create and maintain a resume using MS Word for example, we can also benefit from open technology standards.
I know, it's another of those fine lines, but proprietary formats are cages, the keys to which eventually are lost.
No? I have a few copies of various resumes in an old Word Perfect format. Guess what, I can't open them anymore, they are completely useless to me.
That's not to say HTML and other web markup languages will enjoy immortality, but such publicly shared interests seem positioned well against corporate property
interests and all of the pressures and shifting priorities that accompany them.
Ultimately I'm just suggesting that something as simple as a resume is benefited by an augmentation on the web:
24/7 accessibility, asynchronicity, open standards, enhanced media, and dynamism all add up to a potential for serious competitive advantage for you.
Samples, Documentation, Contributions -
Everything said about a resume applies doubly for your portfolio of work samples, documentation that you may generate, or collaborative contributions you make.
Whether you are an artist, illustrator, poet, animator, game programmer, musician, film maker, or just about anything else that yields tangible output,
I think having a personal website to showcase your efforts is helpful.
In my case, while I aspire to many of the skill sets named, it's mostly designs, sites, tools, games, how-to examples, informational structures,
and programming techniques that occupy my focus.
Experiments -
There are always those interests that don't necessarily align to your traditional pursuits.
Unless and until these hobby-like interests graduate into something else, they need their own shoebox on a shelf to live in.
