The people behind JSON Resume

JSON Resume began in 2014 with Thomas Davis and Roland Sharp and a practical idea: give résumé information a shared, structured format so people could reuse it across tools and designs. Experience, education and skills live in a JSON file, and themes handle how that information appears on the page. The project was already being discussed on Hacker News in July 2014.

The public introduction came earlier than the maintainers expected. In their first release post, Davis and Sharp described turning that attention into a usable specification. On 31 July they released version 0.0.0, with a command-line validator, an npm-based theme system and a standards committee, and a stated priority of helping people manage their own job-seeking profiles.

Portability depended on other tools reading and writing the format. In September 2014 the team announced its first service integration: Represent had added JSON Resume export.

Themes gave contributors another way to put the schema to work. By November the project was showcasing designs including Elegant, Kendall and Paper, and announced a monthly theme competition sponsored by Hired.com.

The 2019 fifth-birthday update looked back on slower development and a community contributing themes, parsers, converters, tools and services, a measured pace that suited a standard. It was candid about the cost of free hosting, and introduced a rewrite that renders résumé files kept in people's own GitHub Gists.

The separation of data and presentation is still the core of the project: the schema describes résumé content, the themes display it, and the projects directory collects the tools built around it.