A public record

A portfolio is a claim. A record is evidence. I’d rather keep the evidence and let the claims fall out of it.

So the front page here isn’t a list of my best work; it’s a list of the most recent things, whatever they are — a job, a project, a principle, a paper, a half-formed thought. The margin keeps the dates. Anyone can scroll back and see what I was working on and what I thought at the time, including the parts I’d now put differently, and including the things that didn’t work: the abandoned prototype stays on the record because the abandonment is the finding.

Writing in public has one effect I want: it makes me finish sentences. A thought that stays in my head can be vague forever. A thought that has to survive being read by a stranger has to stand up on its own. And a register that other documents derive from has to be right, which is the point.