The CV That Was Never Enough
A CV that always needed manual editing turned out to be the reason I decided to build a website of my own.
A CV that always needed manual editing turned out to be the reason I decided to build a website of my own.
What makes a CV that already looks polished suddenly feel inadequate?
At the time, I was focused on finding remote work as a graphic designer. Like most people, I had a single CV that I sent out whenever an opportunity came up.
The problem only became apparent after a few months. Every time I had a new project, a new client, or something new to add, I had to open the document, edit it manually, and save another version.
At first, this seemed like a minor inconvenience. But over time, I realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the way I was doing it.
The CV I sent last week might not be the same as the version I had today. I had to keep track of which version I had sent to whom. The more often I edited it, the more likely it became that I would forget to update something or introduce inconsistencies in the formatting.
For a while, I thought this was simply normal. Everyone updates their CV from time to time.
But the real question was not whether it was normal. It was whether it was effective.
Whenever a static document has to keep up with something that is constantly changing, there will always be a gap between the current reality and what the document actually says.
That was when I started looking at the problem differently.
The problem was not the CV's format. It was its static nature.
A document cannot update itself.
What I needed was not a better-designed CV, but something that could remain alive and reflect my current situation without requiring me to rebuild it from scratch every time.
That was where the decision to build my own personal website came from.
It was not meant to be just another portfolio website. I wanted it to take over the role of a manually maintained CV. The information would be more or less the same as what you would find in a CV, but presented in a way that felt less rigid than a conventional document.
More importantly, it could keep evolving as my actual work and experience evolved, rather than becoming a snapshot frozen at a particular point in time.
What makes this decision interesting is that it did not come from a plan to learn coding or become a web developer.
It came from a very simple need: I was tired of editing the same document over and over again.
But that simple frustration eventually opened the door to a much longer journey—one I did not fully recognize at the time.
What I Learned
- Small, recurring problems, such as repeatedly editing the same document, can sometimes be enough to motivate something much bigger than originally planned.
- Sometimes, the problem is not the form itself, but the nature of what you are using. The form can remain familiar while its underlying nature becomes more adaptive.
- Real-world needs can be a stronger reason to learn something new than a learning plan created in advance.