DEV Community

Cover image for Beyond the Linear CV

Beyond the Linear CV

Pascal CESCATO on January 04, 2026

This is a submission for the New Year, New You Portfolio Challenge Presented by Google AI About Me My professional path isn't linear. I...
Collapse
 
sylwia-lask profile image
Sylwia Laskowska

Pascal, that’s an absolutely brilliant idea - a CV as a skills graph! I honestly never thought about it that way, and it really is genius; that’s exactly how we grow. Well, I don’t want to worry you, but I guess you can’t stop writing your blog after all - your ideas are just too good!

Collapse
 
pascal_cescato_692b7a8a20 profile image
Pascal CESCATO • Edited

Careful, you’re dangerously close to convincing me 😄
I’ll admit: once you start thinking about careers as graphs, it’s hard to unsee it.
Thanks for the kind words — they definitely make the writing pause feel… flexible.
By the way: did you try with yours?

Collapse
 
sylwia-lask profile image
Sylwia Laskowska

Ah, not yet. I’ve given myself too many tasks for January and now I have to somehow deal with them 😅

Thread Thread
 
pascal_cescato_692b7a8a20 profile image
Pascal CESCATO

Haha, that sounds very familiar 😄
January does have that “let’s do everything at once” energy.
No rush at all — if you ever feel like feeding one task into another, I’ll be curious to see what your graph looks like.

Collapse
 
art_light profile image
Art light

Hello, Paskal.
Wishing you a year filled with growth, health, and success. 🌟
I was waiting for your post.
This is really strong work, both technically and conceptually. You’ve put clear language around something a lot of people with non-linear careers feel but don’t usually know how to describe: how much meaning gets lost when years of connected experience are forced into a simple timeline. Thinking about professional identity as a graph instead of a sequence is a genuinely useful shift, and the way you ground it—through density, two-way relationships, and how things evolve over time—keeps it practical rather than theoretical. The demo-first choice also shows good product sense. It lets people immediately understand the value without needing a lot of explanation or buy-in.

On the technical side, the restraint really comes through. Pushing complexity into prompt design instead of code, choosing tools based on how they actually improve interaction, and being upfront about the trade-offs all point to mature decision-making. The idea of showing the same data through different views for different audiences is especially strong, and it feels useful well beyond portfolios—things like HR tools, internal talent mapping, or career coaching come to mind. Overall, this doesn’t just show a product; it reflects a thoughtful way of thinking about careers, data, and AI that feels current and genuinely applicable.

Collapse
 
pascal_cescato_692b7a8a20 profile image
Pascal CESCATO

Thank you, Art, for such a deep and thoughtful reading! You hit the nail on the head regarding my main motivation: the frustration of seeing rich, interconnected career paths flattened into a simple, lossy timeline.

Your point about use cases beyond the portfolio—like HR tools, talent mapping, or coaching—is particularly interesting. Shifting the focus toward graph density and semantic connections instead of just duration really does change how we perceive professional potential.

Also, glad the 'show, don't tell' approach resonated. It was a deliberate product choice to let the data speak for itself immediately. Much appreciated!

Collapse
 
dariomannu profile image
Dario Mannu

Very creative, indeed, but does it not focus a bit too much on how to express it, rather than how to interpret it?
Hiring managers need certain questions to be answered, otherwise they'll risk making some totally wrong hires:

  • Is this person deeply knowledgeable using platform X, or they're just echoing buzzwords heard from colleagues?
  • What are their communication skills like? Are they going to tell me in a concise sentence what's going on, or will they get lost in hundreds of useless details and total confusion every time?
  • Do they possess sound fundamentals? When we put them in front of the new tech we're creating, are they going to pick it up and improve it better than ourselves, or will they just leave a total mess and be even proud of it, genuinely believing and writing in their next CV that they've done good?
  • Do they have initiative, or we'll need to assign them one task after another?
  • Can we see any potential in this hire, if they're a junior and we want to help them grow?
  • Do they collaborate and help up or down the organisation?
  • Any signs of narcisistic or otherwise toxic behaviour we need to gauge before we're screwed?
  • If our environment is already a toxic hell, will this person survive at all?
  • Any signs they are just saying what we want to hear (or lying outright) to get hired?
  • Is this an AI-generated CV, which would hide all the above, or a genuine statement of who this person is?
Collapse
 
pascal_cescato_692b7a8a20 profile image
Pascal CESCATO

That’s a very fair question — and I actually agree with most of it.
This project deliberately focuses on representation, not evaluation. It doesn’t try to answer hiring questions directly, and it shouldn’t replace interviews, references, or human judgment.
What it tries to surface is something more upstream: structure.
Patterns of focus, evolution, depth vs. breadth, long-term coherence, or sudden buzzword spikes become visible in ways a linear CV often hides.
All the questions you list — fundamentals, communication, initiative, collaboration, honesty, even toxicity — still require human interaction. A graph can’t (and shouldn’t) “score” those.
But as a complementary view, it can help frame better conversations:
why certain technologies persist, why others disappear, where real depth might be worth probing, or where something looks inflated and deserves scrutiny.
In that sense, it’s less about making hiring decisions and more about asking better questions — earlier, and with fewer blind spots.
And yes, the risk of AI-generated CVs is real. Ironically, that’s also why alternative representations may become more useful: consistency over time, evolution across versions, and structural coherence are harder to fake than polished bullet points.
So I see this less as a hiring tool, and more as a lens — one that still requires humans on both sides to do the actual thinking.

Collapse
 
benjamin_nguyen_8ca6ff360 profile image
Benjamin Nguyen

Cool! Thank you for sharing :)

Collapse
 
pascal_cescato_692b7a8a20 profile image
Pascal CESCATO

Thanks! Curious to hear if you try it with your own CV -
would love feedback on what works / what doesn't 👍

Collapse
 
benjamin_nguyen_8ca6ff360 profile image
Benjamin Nguyen

No! I have not. I am going to a personal project with AI very soon. I am not sure if I am going to use Matplotlib or potly as graph. I am going to deploy my project on renders.

Thread Thread
 
pascal_cescato_692b7a8a20 profile image
Pascal CESCATO

Nice! For graphs with AI projects, Plotly > Matplotlib if you need
interactivity. That's what I used here for Flow/Matrix views.

Good luck with your project! 🚀

Thread Thread
 
benjamin_nguyen_8ca6ff360 profile image
Benjamin Nguyen

Nice! Thank you :)