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Abraham Mekonnen
Abraham Mekonnen

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AI-Powered Resume Builder with Dynamic PDF Generation and Customization

In today’s fast-paced, competitive job market, having a resume that stands out is crucial. To help professionals streamline this process, I developed an AI-powered resume management system that allows users to create, customize, and optimize resumes based on their career objectives and job descriptions. The system integrates cutting-edge technologies to generate dynamic PDFs, giving users a polished, professional resume in seconds.

Project Overview

The project is built using Spring Boot, with several key libraries and tools that enhance its functionality:

  • OpenPDF for PDF generation.
  • Spring Doc OpenAPI for comprehensive API documentation.
  • Flyway for database migrations.
  • PostgreSQL for data persistence.
  • JPA (Java Persistence API) for managing database entities.
  • Spring AI to integrate with the OpenAI API for resume enhancements based on job descriptions.

The core objective of this project was to create an intuitive system that allows users to manage every aspect of their resume by adding, deleting, or modifying sections such as skills, certifications, education, professional experience, and projects. Additionally, the integration of AI enables the system to analyze job descriptions and adjust the content of the resume accordingly, ensuring it aligns with specific job requirements.

Steps Taken in Development

  1. Template Creation: A professional resume template was designed using OpenPDF to serve as the foundation for the final PDF generation.
  2. PDF Generation Logic: A dedicated class was created to map the template to the resume sections, allowing the dynamic generation of a PDF document.
  3. CRUD Operations: A comprehensive management system was built to allow users to perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on their resume data, ensuring that every section can be easily modified.
  4. Data Migrations with Flyway: Implemented Flyway to manage database migrations, making the system adaptable and easy to maintain.
  5. Docker Integration: Used Docker to containerize the application and databases, allowing for easy deployment and scalability. This also ensures consistency across different environments.
  6. AI-Powered Resume Enhancement: The project leverages Spring AI to integrate with the OpenAI API. Users can submit their resume along with a job description, and the AI tailors the resume content, ensuring it highlights the most relevant skills and experiences. Here is a good YouTube video resource, I used to learn about Spring AI.
  7. Docker Image Creation: The final application is containerized into a Docker image, allowing it to be easily accessed and deployed by others through Docker Hub.

How to Use the System

To generate a personalized, AI-powered resume, simply provide the following details before generating the PDF:

  1. User Details: Basic information such as name, contact details, and other personal data.
  2. Descriptions: A brief overview of your professional summary or objectives.
  3. Skills: A list of relevant technical and soft skills.
  4. Certifications: Any certifications that add value to your expertise.
  5. Education: Details of your educational background.
  6. Projects: Key projects that showcase your experience and contributions.
  7. Professional Experience: A detailed account of your previous job roles and accomplishments.
  8. Prompt for OpenAI API: Provide instructions on how the AI should edit and enhance the resume based on the job description, ensuring that the content is tailored to match the role’s requirements.

Before starting the Docker image, you’ll need to provide your OpenAI API key as an environment variable to enable the AI-powered resume enhancement feature. Once all the necessary fields are filled out, the system generates a customized, professional resume in PDF format that’s ready for use.

Areas for Improvement

While the current system is highly functional, there are areas that could be enhanced:

  • Error Handling: Implementing more robust error-handling mechanisms to ensure smoother operation and better user experience.
  • Unit Testing: Expanding unit tests to cover more scenarios and ensure system reliability.

Future Plans

  1. AWS Lambda Deployment: To improve scalability and reduce operational costs, I plan to deploy the application on AWS Lambda, allowing for serverless operation and automatic scaling.
  2. GraalVM Integration: Integrating GraalVM to optimize the application’s performance, reducing its memory footprint and improving cold startup times, especially in cloud environments.

Conclusion

This AI-powered resume management system represents a step forward in how professionals can craft and optimize their resumes. By automating the process and allowing for easy customization, it saves time and ensures that users always present the best possible version of themselves to potential employers. With planned improvements and future deployments on AWS, this project will continue to evolve and meet the needs of modern professionals.

GitHub-link

Here’s the docker-compose-template file for deploying the AI-Powered Resume Generator application, complete with a Postgres database and optional pgAdmin service. This setup uses environment variables to manage database credentials and integrates the OpenAI API for resume enhancements. Feel free to customize the values as needed for your deployment. Here is the GitHub-repo.

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