It’s a thankless task, searching for a job. You send off your CV, or resume, and it joins a thousand other destined for the round file. What on earth can you do to make your career stand out, and catch the eye of the recruiter?
If you are [Pablo Jiménez Mateo], the answer is straightforward enough. Simply combine the document as a PDF with an x86 bootloader, to make a readable document that will also boot an x86 computer system. He can do this relatively easily by prepending the bootloader file to the PDF, as long as the “%PDF” header of the CV remains within the first 1024 bytes it will remain a readable document. Which it does, though as our GitHub screenshot shows, not in all PDF readers.
A bootable PDF is pretty cool and we have to salute his effort in getting it in front of us in the hope of career boost, but it would be fair to admit that it’s a trick that has been done before. So it’s time to turn attention to the bootloader itself, whose code comes in the form of an extremely well-commented assembly file that loads some sprites and a border to a VGA screen that looks as though it might be the first room in a top-down adventure game. Through the code we can gain an appreciation of just how simple a bootloader can be, and that in itself makes this project worth a second look.
If writing your own bootloader interests you, that’s certainly a subject we’ve covered in the past. It’s possible to make bootable images very small indeed, even down to fitting in a Tweet.
