I spent two days filling a portfolio. Sixteen years in software, dozens of projects, hundreds of thousands of lines. Into content/projects/ went twenty-plus cases. And that is only up to 2014.
I open the files and catch the question: was that even mine? Some projects smell like coffee in that office. Others feel borrowed from a neighboring life.
In places I do not remember whole stretches. I did the work. I did not live it. Autopilot. That scares me more than a deadline.
What is left
I remember the midnight marketplace release and the conversion jump. The three months before it are gone.
I remember an argument about architecture. How it ended, I do not. A commit remains.
I remember decisions. The road to them is gone.
I remember the projects I dragged through. The wrecks have been erased.
Wake, tasks, code, commit, review, release, sleep. A year. Two. Five. Ten. When a project sits on a project, memory does not write an event. It writes noise.
Behind the numbers
The cards look fine: LCP 1.8s, plus 18% conversion, 99.9% uptime. That is not the whole story.
Marketplace: a 2.5 MB hero, who does that, CSS holding the render, SEO falling, deadlines on fire.
Monorepo: eight circular dependencies, every release a line of dominoes, the team stuck, VSCode falling over.
Analytics platform: three to five crashes a week, production dying under load, metrics drowning in logs.
Behind every "I pulled it through" there was a wreck. I remember the numbers. How I lived it, I do not.
When emotion is at zero, memory does not put an event on the shelf. It puts a hum. I build, I ship, I erase myself from my own story.
Failures teach more than wins. They also hurt more. Memory prefers to wipe the pain.
What to do with it
A portfolio is not a chronicle of sixteen years. A client needs six to eight cases with before and after, a role, and a number. The whole stack is of no use to them. Notes while the thing is still hot save hours later: a screenshot, a demo, a photo of the board, while it still smells.
I see a therapist. Not as a fire truck. I just go.
The past here is context, not a sentence. I cannot go back and live those years again. I can choose what to do next so that it has a smell.
That is why I am moving to my own products, to games, to writing. Not because I "should remember." Because I want this stretch, later, to come back by smell, not only by LCP.
See also
