I Built the Resume Tool My Broke Student Self Needed

2MJ — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 15:42:44 +0000

This is a submission for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Community

The Community

You finish a project you’re proud of. Your GitHub is active, you’ve taken courses, maybe done an internship. You have the skills.

Now you need a resume.

You open a resume builder — and it immediately starts boxing you in.

“Company Name.”

But you freelanced.

The formatting looks fine in the editor but breaks in the PDF.

You try another tool. Same issue.

You switch to Google Docs — now you’re fighting spacing.

You try LaTeX — now you’re learning a new tool just to describe what you already know.

I built this for students who have real skills but struggle to present them clearly — not because they lack ability, but because the tools get in the way.

And I’m one of them.

What I Built

I built Resmd — an open-source resume builder where you write in plain text and export a polished PDF.

No forms. No drag-and-drop. No locked templates.

It uses a simple Markdown-inspired syntax called ResMarkup:

# Bio
Name: Amara Osei
Title: Full Stack Engineer
Email: amara@example.com
Location: Earth
GitHub: github.com/amaraosei

# Experience

## Software Engineer Intern @ Acme Corp
Date: Jun 2024 – Aug 2024
Location: Remote

- Reduced API response time by 40% through query optimization
- Built a CI pipeline that cut deployment time from 20 minutes to 4

Write your resume like a document. See it rendered live. Switch templates without touching your content. Export a clean PDF.

Your resume stays as plain text — portable, versionable, and fully yours.

AI Features

Students often know what they did — they just struggle to phrase it well. Resmd helps with:

AI Enhance — rewrite a bullet point to make it clearer and stronger
AI Chat — get suggestions based on your full resume
AI Review — structured feedback (coming soon)
AI Match — compare your resume to a job description (coming soon)

You can create multiple resume versions, share a public link (/r/your-slug), and choose from five templates.

It’s open source under AGPL-3.0. You can self-host, fork it, or build your own template.

Demo

Live: https://resmd.vercel.app/

Code: https://github.com/attahiruj/resmd

How I Built It

Layer	Technology
Framework	Next.js
Language	TypeScript
Database & Auth	Supabase
Styling	Tailwind CSS
Editor	CodeMirror 6
AI	OpenRouter
PDF	@react-pdf/renderer

The hardest part was keeping the web preview and the PDF output visually consistent. React PDF doesn’t use standard CSS, so each template has two renderers — one for the browser and one for the PDF — powered by the same parsed data structure.

The AI runs server-side with session validation and rate limiting. The default model runs through OpenRouter’s free tier, and the rest of the stack also fits within free plans. The goal was simple: something any student can use — or host — without paying.

This started as a personal frustration. Its a tool I will genuinely use.