_andychung

A lot of people like to think of us as a complete LinkedIn replacement, which is a bit far fetched given our 2 person team. I like to think of LinkedIn as a way to be found and indexed by a massive search engine, and Read.cv as your friendly profile you would want to share with recruiters or as the link in your bio. Custom domains make your profile even more professional to share too!

We also have a great tight knit community of creatives who aren't into the LinkedIn influencer posts — so you might find some chill new people to connect with as well!

Awhile back we shared a new professional platform we'd created called Read.cv — a super minimalist profile with your work history, projects, and case studies. A lot of people had been asking for custom domains to turn their profile into a personal homepage. Well today we are happy to launch personal domains, complete with custom typography and themes!

We used Vercel's new Edge Functions to make the routing work seamlessly in our web app, while under the hood it's actually using Cloudflare Workers to do middleware processing and routing at the edge layer. Because all this routing happens at the edge layer before requests even make it to our web app, we get features like bundle splitting, authentication and caching at the per domain level, and all for free. The end result is that we can build a web app without worrying about all the hairy details: we can re-use components from our main site in custom domains, static resources correctly load from custom domains rather than our main site, and all the routing logic is cached at the edge layer for fast handling.

Let us know if you try out custom domains, and happy to answer any questions about the feature!

Ahh thank you so much!

Awesome to hear! Initially we only offered profiles and pages so people would only really log on to update when they had accomplished something new or were job hunting. With the front page we feel like there are more opportunities to come back and engage with the community, especially if you're a hiring manager for your team.

I wanted to give a little update on read.cv since I originally posted this as a side project back in January. I'm excited to say the original post gave me the confidence to take this from a side project to a full time commitment. Two friends have joined the team and we've built a whole bunch of new stuff!

* Pages — a self publishing tool that allows you to create case studies in the context of your profile. You may have seen this in action on Daring Fireball's post about the Chrome Home design this week.

* Front Page — a community hub showcasing the best work from around the platform.

* Replies — Privately kick off a conversation from any experience, page, or status update. No likes or comments on the platform.

* Following — keep up to date with friends and collaborators. No follower vanity metrics.

Just wanted to say thanks for the push to take this further. Would love to hear what you think about the updates!

Cool this is super helpful, thank you!

I tried doing it through 101domain.com and couldn't because I didn't have a registered business in Cape Verde. I tried again using Marcaria.com and they handled the registration process and I haven't had any issues so far.

This makes total sense, will look into more ways to export your data.

For sure! I actually can't wait to remove my profile from the homepage completely, there are lots of great ones now.

Thanks for the great feedback! I definitely want to explore a company profiles product - will be interesting trying to make that feel rich enough with only a few companies on board at the beginning.

As for Quip I left in July but I'll be sure to pass the feedback on!

Thank you! It started as a side project but I have a few ideas on how to turn this into something a bit more real.

Haha yup

For sure get what you mean. I actually wanted to give equal weight to things like projects and side projects for this very reason (instead of purely work experience and education). I'm hoping this can be seen a little bit less like a formal CV, and sort of a easy to share link you can throw in your bio or even use as a personal website.

Definitely heard the private account feedback - and recruiter spam is a big reason why I didn't want to include any kind of comments of DMs for a first version. Will be looking into how to better support this.

In terms of monetization I plan on keeping the profile aspect free to use. If the user base gets big enough to warrant it I could see charging businesses to create job listings on a jobs section or something.

The authentication emails are sent by Firebase.

For sure, have heard this feedback before especially from people who would like to hide their profile from their current employer.

I haven't heard of FRESH before, but I'll certainly look into it. Filling out a CV is a chore and anything I can do to make it easier for people would be great.

Thanks! Ah yeah, sounds like it could have been a weird connection and failed to load the rest of the page.

Great feedback - some other sections that have been requested are patents, teaching, and languages. Will likely be adding these soon.

These are simply the most recent users who have signed up, and unfortunately the the HN demographic is pretty male...

I'm thinking of simply truncating collaborators after a certain number and offering the ability to open the full list in a modal or something.

I haven't implemented gestures to open the sidebar yet unfortunately - currently to close the sidebar on mobile either tap the right edge of the screen (the sliver of the detail), or tap a navigation item in the sidebar.

Have definitely been thinking about how to make sections more customizable as I'll never be able to make the defaults cover every use case. What bugs are you encountering?

You can rearrange the order of the sections using the grab handles in the editor. Let me know if that helps!

Thanks! I think pulling information from LinkedIn would be awesome and really reduce friction to creating an account.

Welp, sorry about that. Wonder if the .cv tld makes has anything to do with this...

Totally, on my to do list to redo the homepage with more abstracted product visuals!

Wow thank you! It was definitely a fun project.

Thank you fellow Andy — Hear you about the homepage, hoping to completely redo it soon and create more abstracted visuals. In terms of the pointer, my current logic is to use cursor: pointer on anything that visually looks like a link (e.g. unstyled text), and to leave it as default for components that have a visual affordance that they are clickable (e.g. buttons or tabs). I realize this might not be the most web-like convention though - might be worth it to just move all clickable components to the pointer cursor.

The idea is that you're able to (optionally) tag coworkers and collaborators in your work experience and projects. Although this doesn't track 1:1 with the traditional CV use case, it felt like a great way to celebrate the people you work with and create lightweight endorsements.

If you choose to print or save your profile as a PDF these tags are hidden automatically, making it much more of a traditional CV, appropriate for job applications etc.