You can’t do it alone. Get help. Get with the team. Be a team player. Cooperate. Communicate. Integrate. Don’t take all the credit. Collaborate. All great qualities.

Until, you take the leap. Choose your destiny. Make your own luck. Diversify. Get out of the rut and learn something new. All great advice.

“Portfolio?”

Oh, well, hmm, uh…. I was on a team that refactored a 6 year old enterprise level web application from using technology X to Y. I can’t really show you because it is behind a login and it looks a lot like it did before, just better. Sigh.

“Github?”

Oh, well, hmm, uh…. All my work was committed to my client’s private repo, and there’s this NDA, and I rarely created anything myself, everyone on the team built it together. Sigh.

“Anything from your previous job?”

Oh, that company was acquired and shuttered five years ago.

“Before that?”

None of those websites exist anymore, either. (ColdFusion 5 and PHP 4? I sure hope those old clients upgraded!)

I’m in a weird spot. I have been making websites since July 1997, but less of a portfolio to show clients and employers that I did when I graduated college in 2001 (or even my portfolio to get in to college). Some of my former coworkers are in the same predicament. It doesn’t help being an introvert that would rather work a node tree than a room of decisionmakers.

So, I’m going to extract, obfuscate, and maybe improve the type of work I have been doing all these years to showcase my skill, but hopefully help someone. I’m either going to help someone who needs to be told that they shouldn’t do it this way, or I am going to help you, who are going to do it anyway 😉