{datadrivencv} of the ultimate (read as ‘best’) troublemaker

We’re going to create a cv using {datadrivencv} by Nicholas Strayer

What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.

— Nelson Mandela

Timeline pic from Timelinemaker where the featured timeline was Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

Background

I recently applied for admission into an online Masters in Analytics at a US university. As part of the process I needed to submit my CV. I used Nicholas Strayer’s {datadrivencv} to create the CV I submitted.

But I am a bit embarrassed at putting my own CV into the public domain, so I thought I would create a mock CV for the best “troublemaker” to ever have graced this earth - at least in my opinion - Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela 💗!

There are no words for what Madiba did for my country, I still remember mourning his death like that of a dearest loved one, so foundational was he in this ordinary South African’s life.

So, what are we doing?

We’re going to run through the motions of setting up a CV using the {datadrivencv} 📦.

Download {datadrivencv} 📦

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("nstrayer/datadrivencv")

Set-up data

The data is housed within a google sheet, or alternately you can generate csv’s from an Excel workbook / Googlesheet to hold your data.

We’re going to use the google sheet method since it is the easiest and cleanest.

Google Sheet Method

Instead of starting from scratch, as Nicholas says in the documentation, you can create a copy of this data and amend it to suit your needs.

Figure 1 - Make a copy of Nick’s Google Sheet Data

Google Sheet Amendments

Amend your google sheet copy as you need.

Entries Sheet

I removed certain sections, and added a born, community_positions and awards section.

I renamed data_science_writings to writing.

Here is what my entries sheet looks like after my changes.

Figure 2 - My entries sheet in the Google Sheet Workbook

Text Blocks Sheet

You may also want to include different aside(s) in your CV. These are specified in the text_blocks sheet of the google sheets document.

Here is what my text_blocks sheet looks like after my changes. The aside(s) are tailored to the sections I have included on the entries sheet.

Figure 3 - My text_blocks sheet in the Google Sheet Workbook

This is an aside, which renders in the gutter of an article. Your asides will render in the gutter of your html and pdf CV.

Contact and Languages

These are the other 2 sheets which need to be personalised with your info.

Create skeleton project

1. Create a folder in an appropriate location on your machine, which will house the files of your CV.

2. I like working in an R project. If you’d like to do the same, open RStudio, and create a project in that “Existing folder” you created in step 1 (File -> New Project -> Existing Directory)

3. Run something similar to the below in your console window, after replacing the names with yours, and also replacing the data_location with the location of where your data is housed (i.e. the URL of your copy of the google sheet data).

   datadrivencv::use_datadriven_cv(
        full_name = "Nelson Mandela",
        data_location = "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_6fzNA6MwDSjUBXjjV7ThJfKEYj8xxJO9i09IV1cVVY/edit#gid=917338460",
        pdf_location = here::here("nelson-mandela.pdf"),
        html_location = here::here(),
        source_location = here::here()
    )
    

   • This creates a few files in your folder, the most important ones being cv.rmd, cv_printing_functions.r and render_cv.r.
   • cv.rmd contains the flow of your CV, this is the file which you amend as you need, for example, if I wanted to add a Community Building section I would do so in this file.
   • cv_printing_functions.r contains the code to print your CV. This is generally not amended, but I did make a few amendments which I will show in the course of the tutorial.
   • render_cv.r renders both the html and pdf versions of your CV when it is run (sourced).

cv.rmd

• In cv.rmd you will set out the flow of your CV.

• Here, for example is where I added the Born section, and any other sections which were particular to my entries sheet.

      Born {data-icon=superpowers data-concise=true}
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
    ```{r}
    CV %<>% print_section('born')
    ```

• I also amended certain sections I had re-named. All in all this should talk to your entries sections, and the text_blocks names (stored in column loc) for your asides.

  

  Figure 4 - My Google Sheet entries for the community_positions section

  

  Figure 5 - My Google Sheet text_blocks for the community_positions section

  

  Figure 6 - The “Community Experience” section in the cv.rmd file

• Some other things you might want to do here is change the data-icon part. For example, I wanted a superhero icon for the Born section so I searched fontawesome for something like that. It doesn’t work all the time, and I have not dug into the reason behind why some icons are not rendering. For example, searching for hero gives the option of a mask but making data-icon=mask does not render.

  

  Figure 7 - fontawesome search for “superpower”

  

  Figure 8 - fontawesome search for “graduate”

• You may need to add line breaks to align your CV nicely. To do this add a <br> in the cv.rmd file to space sections out to your liking.

  <br>
  <br>

cv_printing_functions.r

There is not much to do in this file. If you want to keep your Google sheet private there is something you need to do, but we’ll get into that later.

In Nick’s data you will see that the loc column contains the university or company, and the institution column contains the actual physical place.

Figure 9 - Nick’s location and institution entries

I did it the opposite, that is, for loc I captured the physical place on earth, whereas institution I captured ANC etc.

Figure 10 - My location and institution entries are swopped

So I needed to amend the print_section() function in this file. I switched the {loc} and {institution} positions in the glue_template.

Figure 11 - The amended print_section() function in cv_printing_functions.r

Data for CV

The data for the CV may be housed in:

• A private Google Sheet file
• A public Google Sheet file
• csv files on your local machine

Working with a Private Google Sheets File in R

You may prefer to keep your google sheet file private, and not have it publicly available for everyone to see.

1. In this case we need to authenticate for the R session.

   googlesheets4::gs4_auth(email = "test@gmail.com")
    

2. A new window will open in the browser asking you to allow “Tidyverse API Packages”, or similar, access to your Google Account. Allow the access so that you may read the google sheets in your R session.

3. In the R session you will be asked if information must be cached to a/certain/path/in/your/local/machine. I said yes to mine and set my options in the cv_printing_functions.r file to the cache specified, as follows:

   options(
           gargle_oauth_cache = "C:/Users/vebashini/.R/gargle/gargle-oauth"
    )
    

   

   Figure 12 - Authentication cache in cv_printing_functions.r

4. In the cv.rmd file only the pdf_mode parameter is present, but since we are keeping the Google sheet private we need to add another parameter sheet_is_publicly_readable and set it to false.

   params:
     pdf_mode:
       value: true
     sheet_is_publicly_readable:
       value: false

   

   Figure 13 - sheet_is_publicly_readable Parameter needed in the cv.rmd file

5. We want to pass this parameter into the create_CV_object() function so we amend it as well.

   

   Figure 14 - Parameter needed in the create_CV_object() function too

Working with a Public Google Sheets File in R

If you’re okay to keep your Google Sheet public you need to Share your sheet by specifying that “Anyone with the link” may View the google sheet.

Figure 15 - Allow your Google Sheet to be viewed by anyone with the link

There is no need to add the sheet_is_publicly_readable to your parameter list in cv.rmd.

The sheet_is_publicly_readable parameter is TRUE by default and hence the googlesheets4::sheets_deauth() will be run.

Figure 16 - Sharing the Google sheet with public access means that the R session can work without authentication

Working with csvs

If you want you can also download the Google sheet data as an Excel file on your machine and amend it there.

To create csvs from the Excel file you can run something like this:

library(readxl)
library(readr)

entries <- read_xlsx("csvs/madiba_cv_data.xlsx", sheet = 1)
language <- read_xlsx("csvs/madiba_cv_data.xlsx", sheet = 2)
text_blocks <- read_xlsx("csvs/madiba_cv_data.xlsx", sheet = 3)
contact <- read_xlsx("csvs/madiba_cv_data.xlsx", sheet = 4)

write_csv(entries, "csvs/entries.csv")
write_csv(language, "csvs/language_skills.csv")
write_csv(text_blocks, "csvs/text_blocks.csv")
write_csv(contact, "csvs/contact_info.csv")

The Google Sheets method is better because every amendment you make on the Excel workbook will mean re-running this code 😨!

You will also need to make the data_location argument in the create_CV_object() (in cv.rmd) be the folder where your csvs are located.

Figure 17 - Amend the data_location argument in the create_CV_object() function

Render your CV

Finally you’re all set to be able to render your CV!

To do this you source the render_cv.r file.

source('C:/Work/Learning/madiba-cv/render_cv.r')

If you want to host the html version of your CV as a static site (say on GitHub Pages, or Netlify) you should make one amendment in this file.

Change the output file in your HTML rendering call from cv.html to index.html.

Figure 18 - Amend the output_file argument to be index.html

Host Online

1. Push your files to GitHub.
2. In the Settings Page navigate to GitHub Pages section and fill in the source as your branch, and the folder as root.
3. Your site will be published with a URL (it may take a few minutes to render so try again after a few minutes if you experience a 404 error).

Figure 19 - Setup the GitHub Pages to host your CV online

Appendices

1. {datadrivencv} GitHub site as well as documentation.
2. Nick’s blog post.
3. Nick’s CV.
4. Connecting to Google Sheets.
5. Google Sheets Authentication, also {gargle}.

Mock CV Files

The mock CV source files can be found here.

The html finished product is here.

Note: I amended the Google Sheet to be public and amended the code to use a “public” file so an audience can see all the components.

Packages used

In this post the main packages we used are the following:

library(datadrivencv)
library(googlesheets4)
library(pagedown)
library(magrittr)
library(readxl)
library(readr)
library(knitr)
library(glue)
library(gargle)
library(here)

Most of these are installed as part of the install of {datadrivencv}.