Anyway

Now is a good time to update my resume (cv), and I’m hav­ing a little dif­fi­culty in fig­ur­ing out the best way to present it. The clas­sic “say what you did for the employ­er” tends to assume that your involve­ment in pro­jects is bounded by your employ­ment, but that’s not always the case. For example, I’ve chaired tech­nic­al com­mit­tees and been involved with con­fer­ence organ­isa­tion for time peri­ods that over­lapped both employ­ers and being self-employed. For example, I chaired the XML Con­fer­ence from 2001 to 2005, work­ing for (in chro­no­lo­gic­al order) SoftQuad Soft­ware, my own con­sult­ing firm, and Sun Microsys­tems. It’s the over­lap­ping time peri­ods that I’m hav­ing dif­fi­culty in fig­ur­ing out how to present. I guess I could go to a pure pro­ject-based resume, except for, some of what I did was on behalf of a par­tic­u­lar employ­er and thus was bounded with­in that time period.

I can­’t ima­gine I’m the only per­son with this issue; any­one con­trib­ut­ing to open source soft­ware over a peri­od of time has it, as well as people who volun­teer at oth­er organ­isa­tions in their spare time. How do oth­ers present what they’ve done in a way that suit­ably high­lights the import­ant stuff?