Resources – Craig Strachan

How to craft the perfect CV

I have conducted hundreds of interviews and seen thousands of CV’s, and its frustrating and wasteful looking at a poorly-written CV’s. Here are some tips to ensure your CV stands out and effectively communicates your qualifications and suitability for the role. While my focus is on IT, these principles apply to most jobs.

The 5-Minute Rule

Interview decisions are often made in just 2-5 minutes of reviewing your CV, so it’s essential to make an impact. Concentrate the most crucial information on the first two pages; anything beyond that may receive only a quick glance at best.

The Basics

Honesty: Always be truthful in your CV. Embellishing or falsifying information can damage your reputation. Note that credit and qualification checks are often part of the hiring process.
Consistent Updates: Regularly update your CV. You never know when you might need it.
Realistic Goals: Aim high but be realistic. If you lack experience in a specific area, be honest about it and demonstrate your willingness to learn (eg by doing industry courses).
Brevity: Keep your CV concise and to the point.
LinkedIn: Keep your LinkedIn profile up to date, including a professional photo, and have a link to it on your CV.

Content

Customize your CV for the job you’re applying for. If applying for different roles, create variations tailored to each role.
List your previous jobs, starting with the most recent. Highlight a few key accomplishments that showcase your skills, focusing on your contributions. Be brief. You don’t need to mention every task you performed.
The first page should prominently display industry qualifications that make you stand out, such as “AWS Certified Architect/Developer,” “TOGAF,” “DAMA,” etc.
Clearly state your objective, and what you are looking for.
Keep the formatting simple and readable. Your CV should allow a quick decision about the worthiness of an interview.
Include essential contact details (email, phone, LinkedIn), but avoid overly personal information (such as your address, photo of your ID doc, ID number etc). Remember your CV can cross many desks and security is a concern.
Add a neat head and shoulders photo on the front page.
List relevant technical skills and tools you’re proficient in, emphasizing your abilities.
Share your interests and hobbies, showing a bit of your personality.
Proofread your CV for spelling and grammar, and consider having someone else review it.
Don’t mention the obvious. If you are applying as a software developer its a given that you know how to use Excel.

If you’re starting out

For recent grads or final-year university students:

Provide a brief introduction about yourself, highlighting your favourite courses and personal projects.
Share your extracurricular activities and any volunteer work or part-time work experience.

Here is a rough outline

Contact Details

Name, photo, phone, email & LinkedIn (add a website if available). Include links to anything relevant online (eg github profile/projects, personal blog, online portfolio etc)

Career Objectives/Overview

Who you are.
What you’re looking for.
Your core skills.

Relevant Qualifications

Degrees and industry certifications.

Project Highlights/Work Experience

Notable career highlights.
Core skills.
Work-related awards and achievements.

Employment History

Organization, title, dates.
Be honest about employment gaps.

Hobbies, Volunteer Work, Personal Projects

Include personal interests and hobbies.

Additional skills

List skills that may not be directly relevant, but are still interesting (Eg additional languages spoken)

Additional Awards and Achievements

Community-related awards/achievements (eg president of my chess club).

Recommendations

Any recommendations you have received in the past (thanks, linked in recommendations etc)

Anything Else

School highlights and awards.
Contactable references. You do not need to include the names, but mention that they are available on request. And check with the references beforehand.

Image by Vectorportal.com

Ulysses – markdown editing

Before I tell you about Ulysses and why I think it’s a great piece of software, a quick primer on markdown.

What is markdown?

Markdown is an easy way to create rich documents using a plain text editor (with bold, italic, etc), and it is particularly useful to create HTML content. Markdown makes it easy to create blog posts without having to worry too much about the formatting, but you can still perform powerful formatting in a text editor. For example, you can create:

A headings

Or you can create

More headings

Or if you want a list it easy easy. Just use a *

item 1
item 2
and more Markdown is pretty fast to learn, and with a handful of basic formatting commands you are all set. Have a look at the Wikipedia article to find out more about markdown.

Ulysses

Most modern text editors provide some sort of markdown support. But there is a single feature that Ulysses gets right. Even though markdown is simple, it is easy to get confused and mess up the formatting.

Ulysses shows you how your document is going to look in the plain text. You don’t need to switch to a markdown preview view. This makes it super-fast to write web content.

Simple markdown

If you look at the below screenshot, you can clearly see what I wrote, and this formatted blog post is of course how it appears. Screen Shot 2017 06 26 at 2 59 24 PM

Sample markdown screenshot

Commands

While markdown only requires you to learn a handful of formatting commands, you don’t even need that! Your traditional CMD-B will turn test into bold, or CMD-I for italic etc. Or you can use the simple dropdown pallet for a shortcut of the main commands.

Screen Shot 2017 06 26 at 2 59 50 PM

Command list

Word count

Ulysses gives a nice view of word coun,’ as well as an estimation of page reading time, and you can set goals and see your progress towards that goal.

Screen Shot 2017 06 26 at 2 59 58 PM

Read time

Screen Shot 2017 06 26 at 3 00 46 PM

Goal progress

Creating articles

Ulysses is good for creating ideas and draft articles; since everything is stored in a single notebook you don’t have to keep on creating and saving draft files; you just add a new page and start typing. This feature is very similar to Onenote and Evernote (except they don’t support markdown). In my workflow I create a group for articles, which is broken down into:

Ideas
Draft
Complete

Articles roughly move from ideas to draft then complete as they move through the writing and editing process.

Not just for web

While the main benefit of Ulysses is to rapidly creat HTML, since it is just rich text, you can easily use it for print formats as well. Ulysses allows you to export to docx (Microsoft Word), PDF, epub and text. You can also publish directly to a WordPress blog. Here’s a quick example of the PDF export (you can fully customize the PDF).

Screen Shot 2017 06 26 at 3 42 30 PM
PDF export

Other features

I have just touched on a few features of Ulysses, there are a ton of other features, including:

tagging
powerful search and filters
attachments
automatic sync across devices
automatic backups
Dropbox sync
Styling

Is Ulysses for you?

If you aren’t interesting in learning or using markdown, then no I wouldn’t bother using it. But if you already using markdown, or see it as a potential tool to create online content then I strongly recommend it. I have been using it for about a month now, and its great. It was easy to create markdown or HTML articles, the grouping and tagging allows you to use whatever workflow you want, and it has a powerful search capability.

Unfortunately for Windows users, it is Apple only (Mac and IOS) You can find out more on the Ulysses website.

Finally the disclosure. I was provided with a free copy of Ulysses for this review, and I used it to create this review. But I am finding myself using it more and more as a general note-taking application, and for creating and managing my blog posts.

What I talk about when I talk about running

Images Haruki Murakami is best known as the author of “Norwegian Wood”, and the “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” – and many other books. If you haven’t read his books I highly recommend you check them out. But recently I discovered that he is a long-distance runner as well and has written about his running.

I have just finished “What I talk about when I talk about running”, and It is excellent. As a runner I related completely to his journey, his challenges and successes, his apprehension and self-doubt before races, and the acceptance of the unpredictability of marathon-length races.

The philosophy he bring to running – that you need to be as healthy as possible to be effective at what you do, and how maintaining health (in his case by running and doing triathlons), needs to be balanced with what you do. To be mentally sharp and focused requires a healthy body.

He says:

To deal with something unhealthy, a person needs to be as healthy as possible. That’s my motto. In other words, an unhealthy soul requires a healthy body. This might sound paradoxical, but it’s something I’ve felt very keenly ever since I became a professional writer. The healthy and the unhealthy are not necessarily at opposite ends of the spectrum. They don’t stand in opposition to each other, but rather complement each other, and in some cases even band together. Sure, many people who are on a healthy track in life think only of good health, while those who are getting unhealthy think only of that. But if you follow this sort of one-sided view, your life won’t be fruitful.
Almost everything he had to share could have been written by me, or for me. Although I am convinced that any long-distance runner would feel exactly the same.

It is a short and easy read, but a book to be dipped into, reread and digested over time. To get full enjoyment from the book you probably have to enjoy running, but there is plenty to learn regardless of what get you up in the morning.

Day One review

If you use a Mac and keep any sort of journal this is an app to look at. If you are a Windows user this is one more reason to make the switch.

I have been a user of Day One version 1 for several months, and it is an excellent tool for journaling. They pay attention to detail in both the design and the features. It has a clean and beautiful interface, and it’s super-easy to use. The MAC and IOS apps play nicely together, and sync is easy to setup and just works!

Day One recently released a new version with the somewhat confusing name of Day One 2.0. I have been using this version for about 2 weeks now. Here’s my review.

What’s new?

There are two big new features:

Firstly support for multiple journals. This is perfect for me because I can now store my personal and work entries in the same place, but in separate journals.
Secondly, in the previous version you could only have a single photo per entry. Now you can have multiple photos. At first I wasn’t really interest in this feature, but I find that I am using it more and more – especially for documenting my travels.

Should you upgrade?

Well that depends on your needs? To upgrade both the Mac and IOS versions will set you back $49.98 (at the moment you can grab the Mac app for $29.99 and the IOS app for $4.99). If you do a lot of journaling, want multiple photos per entry and support for multiple journals then yes it is an excellent application and worth the price.

But if you are happy with a single journal, then aside from a mildly slicker interface you are not going to gain too much additional value.

Of course if you are not yet a user and are looking for a journaling app, this is one to check out.

Wishlist

While the app is great, there are a few things that I think would make it amazing:

Basic customisation of the styling in the posts using my choice of fonts and colours
Ability to export entries for a date range, and for the PDF export to show the images full-width, and to be able to select the fonts and colours
Applescript support would be amazing

But it’s a great app. It is easy to use, and makes keeping an electronic journal really easy.

You can find out more and get App Store links from their website.

Disclaimer: I was given a complimentary review copy from Day One

Book review: The Healthy Programmer

This book is a practical guide for computer programmers (or any office worker) who want to get more fit and healthy. While the book is clearly geared towards computer programmers, it would only take a minor adjustment to call it something like “The Healthy Office Worker”. While the book uses the Agile programing methodology as a framework, (sprints, retrospectives, unit testing etc), the contents are relevant to anybody spending most of their work days sitting at a computer.

The book goes into a lot of detail, and is full of references, real life stories about programmers that have become more healthy, and practical goals and actions. While it is easy to read, it is detailed and comprehensive, covering topics such as workspace setup, diet, back and wrist pain, exercise and headaches.

The danger is that with so much detail and 19 practical goals, you may be a little overwhelmed. Having said that they are excellent goals and I think you should pick the ones that will work for you and not strive for all 19. One thing that did annoy me is the rather old fashioned notion of counting calories/reducing calories to lose weight. I personally believe that provided you eat the right calories you can eat as much you like and forget about the quantity of calories (basically high fat low carb). This approach has personally worked for me.

The book comes with a free iPhone app (I did not check it out but it is rated 4+), as well as a discussion forum on which the author comments.

Is it worth reading ?- yes most definitely (even if you are not a programer).
Is it going to improve your health and fitness? Well that is up to you.

You can buy the book here, the ebook is $24.

Disclaimer: I was given a free review copy, and I run 20km+ races on a regular basis.

DEVONThink or Evernote?

I have been a paid user of Evernote for a couple of years and have always found it to be a very good service. However I have become recently more and more frustrated in it, in particular changing the MAC interface to a complex and unintuitive interface, and the reliability of the sycing between the cloud and the IOS app. So I have been looking for an alternative, and I think I may have found it in DEVONThink pro.

Since both DEVONThink and Evernote are used to store and find pretty much anything stored in notebooks (e.g. notes, documents, images, PDF etc), they pretty much do the same thing. In some ways DEVONThink does it much better than Evernote, but there are a few limitations as well.

Here is a feature comparison (this is not an exhaustive list of all the features, just what I consider to be most important for me), and some general comments after. While I have tried to keep this feature comparison as objective as possible, it is based on my own experience. Versions compared are Evernote v5.0.6 (MAC) and DevonThink Pro v2.5.1.

Feature	Evernote	DEVONThink
Platform	Cross platform	Mac and iOS only
Groups	Notebooks can be stored in a single group (Evernote calls them stacks), but they cannot be nested in multiple levels	Notebooks can be stored in groups, and groups can be nested.Notes can also be replicated and stored in multiple folders. EG I have a single list of items I need for photoshoots which is stored in both my photography and my travel folder.Smart groups allow for documents in different folders to be visible in a single place. For example I can view all WIP documents in a single place.
Tagging	Tags supported	Tags and labels (WIP, completed etc) supported
Browser plugins	Yes	Yes
Email notes directly to a notebook	Yes	No
Mobile Sync	Over the air	Over the air (mac to mac), but only via wifi for IOS. Note that version 2 of IOS is due soon which will support over the air sync. Of course the wifi sync is super-fast (since only the local network is involved).It is easy to select which notes or notebooks to sync (just replicate them to a “mobile sync” folder).You can also sync to dropbox and webdav
File formats	Evernote; propriety format with limited export ability.	Notes are all regular file formats (pdf, jpg, rtf etc), so it is easy to get the notes out should you wish to migrate the notes somewhere else
Search	Saved searches supported. Search is slow	Saved searches supported via smart groups. Search is super-fast
3rd Party support	Lots of 3rd party applications that connect to Evernote, as well as apps created by them (eg Hello and Food app)	Applescript support allows for extension of capability into other applications.
Editing internal editor	Limited	Since the files are stored in the file system, you can use any external editor (e.g. Textedit for RTF, preview for images etc). However the internal editor generally good enough.
Sharing	Yes and very easy	Yes but a little more complex
Note templates	No	Yes (eg: new agenda)
Size limits	Limits depending if you have a free or paid package, but very generous limits.	Since the files are stored on the computer, no limits
Costs	Free and paid versions (annual fees)	Pay for s/w, but no subscription costs, but it will take about 3 years to break even in cost compared to Evernote
Mobile version offline access (iPhone)	Supported, but I never could get it to reliably work (at last check it told me that I had about 100tb used when I actually had about 100mb used)	Supported via wifi

And now for some subjective comments.

Evernote

While the Evernote IOS application looks really nice, it is overly complex and cumbersome to use. In other words it looks pretty but is not friendly. When sync works it is great, but it constantly seems to be wanting to update notebooks, and the updates seemed to take forever. Of course it has online sync, whereas the DEVONThink products do not (yet – see below).

The PC desktop version is great, and the MAC version was until a recent update in which it became very unintuitive. I had to do an online search to find out how to do a simple thing like delete a notebook.

DEVONThink

The DEVONThink IOS application is very simple, but it is easy to use, search is accessibly (and fast), and navigation is really fast and easy. Sync can only be performed via wifi and not though the cloud (although a new version is due this year which will support sync via the cloud).

It reminds me of using the beautiful OmniFocus interface, similar, easy to use but powerful. This is a good companion product for the GTD junkies and OmniFocus users. While both are simple and intuitive, they are powerful products and have loads of useful features. It is not the cheapest products, but after using it for a few weeks you will wonder how you ever got by without it.

It integrates into almost anything, and getting information into and out of it is a breeze. I feel less “locked in” than with Evernote.

Overall (and yes I am coming from a grumpy Evernote experience), I think that DEVONThink is the winner, it will be my product of choice.

You can download a 30 evaluation version of DEVONThink, or the free version of Evernote and decide for yourself.

Disclosure: free license for both iPhone and MAC were provided by DEVONThink for my evaluation.

Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur: How to publish a book

Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur: How to publish a book, by Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch

Although I would like to publish an ebook at some stage, it is not something that I am looking at doing right now, so the review copy on my Kindle sat there for quote a while before I got to browsing through it. When I eventually got to it, I read the entire book cover to cover in a single day.

This book is for anybody who has or is considering writing, publishing and distribution an ebook, and will save you hours of time and frustration. I have always thought the process of creating an ebook is pretty simple, but there is far more involved that I ever considered.

This book goes into a lot of detail describing the different publishing models, pitfalls to look out for (you will need more than 1 ISBN number), and plenty on the technical aspects of creating a functional and working ebook

There are plenty of links to online resources, including tons of free information on the book site itself (http://apethebook.com/), such as Microsoft Word templates, sample contracts and external links (there are over 350 hyperlinks in the book).

At just under 400 pages it is easy to get through, but it has tons of useful information. If you are planning on wrinting an ebook, I highly recommend you buy it and skim through it before you write a single word, and then jump into the details as you work through the different stages of creating and publishing your book.

Highly recommended, and at less than $10 for the Kindle version, a steal.

Charteo review – create custom slide decks

Here is an interesting way to create your presentations. It’s an online tool called Charteo, which allows you to create a custom slide deck based on a selection of over 10000 online slides. In summary, you pick and choose your slides and create a custom desk.

Select whatever slides you need, and once you are ready, checkout and it will create a downloadable PowerPoint presentation containing all your slide which you can then edit and customise as you wish.

My virtual deck in progress.

You can either buy credits up front and use them as you go, (starting at EUR 29 for 40 credits, scaling through to EUR 399 for unlimited credits).

They sell bundled slide decks to be customised for your own requirements. Eg the SWOT deck contains a selection of slides that would typically be used when doing a SWOT analysis. These decks can help you to rapidly put together presentations with a consistent feel (the bundles are also a lot cheaper than the bespoke decks).

Example of SWOT Bundled slide deck.

While I did not look through all their slides (they have over 10000), I had no difficulty finding suitable slides from my presentation. The website is also really easy and intuitive to use. Here is an example of it in use. Firstly a rough outline for a hypothetical speech:

Toastmasters Southern Africa

9 countries
9 divisions
140 clubs
Club recognition
10 goals
distinguished clubs
select distinguished clubs
president distinguished clubs

The trick with a tool like this is to firstly define your basic presentation layout and figure out what you are wanting to depict, and only then use the website to find slides that match what you are trying to achieve. Otherwise you will find yourself falling in, and spending hours looking all the different layouts, and emerge having seen some great slides, but with little to show for it.

So here is how my slides look after I downloaded the sample deck and customised the content. I am really impressed at the quality of the slides. Start to finish took me about 20 minutes.

I think its a great tool that can help to make your presentations more effective (esp with the icons, graphing and charting slides), but I hesitate at the cost. At roughly EUR 4 per slide, it can quickly get expensive.

Would I use it for my everyday presentations? Probably not (simply because of cost). Would I use it for important business presentations where I can allocate budget? Absolutely; it will save you a lot of time and create some great decks.

It’s a pretty good tool, and I recommend that you give it a testdrive yourself.

Note that Charteo gave me 30 free credits to test with, which I used to create my test deck, and if you use the coupon code charteo10 in the provided field in the shopping cart, you will get a EUR 10 discount.

Review: Cloudberry online backups

I have far too many friends that just don’t create backups, and far too many that backup to an external drive that lives next to their computers, which while marginally better is still basically useless.. Online backups are such a simple solution to this problem, but I have (until now) struggled to find a solution that really meets my needs.

In my quest to find the ultimate online backup solution, here are my requirements:

Compression of files before they are sent to the cloud. This saves in both upload time (bandwidth), and in storage cost.
Encryption of my data on my machine before they are sent to the server
“Trust no one”; only I hold the encryption key, and online data can only be decrypted by me
Versioning of files and keeping deleted files for a period of time
Support of external (USB) drives
Robust

I have used two providers in the past (I won’t mention names), but one of them only supported internal drives, and the other deleted 50gigs of online backup because my external drive was unavailable.

So, I think that I may have finally found a product that does everything I need: Cloudberry Backup. Cloudberry have built a bunch of products that allow for connectivity to cloud storage services (their ‘S3 Explorer” is basically Total Commander for S3; a great product as well).

I have been using Cloudberry Backup for about a week now, and so far I am very impressed. Here are some of the features that impress me:

Optional compression
Block level backups (great for mailboxes)
Support for several cloud storage providers (S3, Rackspace, Azure and Google are just a few)
When using S3 (which is what I use), it gave me the option to use the Reduced Redundancy Storage, which is a little cheaper
Trust no one; however if I lose my backup key I will not be able to recover my files. The backup key is NEVER sent out
Many encryption options (AES256, DES, RC2, 3DES); file names are also encrypted
File Versioning (and deleting of old versions and retention of deleted files)
Scheduling
Real time backups
Server side encryption (s3 only)
Client side encryption

I tried to break it (by removing the external drives during backup), and it just picked up the error and waited for the drives be reconnected.

I then tested by deleting a few files and running a restore, it was a breeze. When I had a few questions, I got a rapid email response from them.

The software is super-simple to use; I will literally backuping up some folders in about 5 minutes. While it has some quite complex and technical features, anybody can use it. It is really easy to use. This is a great product which I think will be my backup solution.

I will post any updates.

Disclaimer: Cloudberry offered me a free license key, but it was only after I started my evaluation, and my evaluation is based on the 14 day trial that I am currently running. If it continues running like I expect, I will use that free key.

Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds

This eclectic series of short essays discusses ideas, questions and concepts that make you think. Sometimes he challenges conventional thinking (why being a follower can be good), and other times he just questions our actions (should you pray for your team to win), there is some advice. And the rest of the time it is just plain interesting.

If you are looking for new ideas, or to find a different take on old idea, you will enjoy this book. As a Toastmasters, there are some great ideas for your next speech.

Some of the ideas discussed are:

The cult of busy
Why you must lead or follow
The size of ideas
How to keep your mouth shut

Many of the essay’s are on Scott’s website, so you can check them out before you buy the book. http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/

This book is kind of a “Chicken Soup for the Philosophical Soul”, and gives you interesting ideas to consider, without being too complex or deep (most of the stories are only a page or two, but the could be expanded into longer essays or books). If I had to criticise, I would like to see some more depth to some of the articles, I feel that sometimes he is just touching the tip of some very complex idea.

But then to contradict myself, it is refreshing to read a chapter that gets my brain engaged, but is only a few hundred words long.

The entire book is just short of 200 pages, but I don’t think that I would read it cover to cover. For me it is a book that you jump into from time to time, find an interesting chapter and read it. They are the kind of chapters that you can re-read a few times. You can buy the print or Kindle version from Amazon.com for just under $11.