Where did my entire work portfolio go?

Not long ago I was cleaning up my personal portfolio website as I hadn't made any meaningful updates in a long time, and I realized just how many of the projects that I've worked on no longer exist on the internet.

In fact, some of the companies that I used to work for no longer exist either. Some were bought out, others went under and some changed their names.

And none of this caught me off guard to be honest. I've been a professional software engineer for over 20 years now, and in the tech world, that's an eternity.

So "some" loss is expected.

However, this got me thinking about the nature of this career. When you’ve been doing this long enough, you start to realize that longevity isn’t the default state of software.

Most systems are temporary by design. Businesses change direction. Markets shift. Teams dissolve. Stacks change and the code follows behind all of that.

And sadly, some of those projects were incredibly complex and really showcased my overall skillset. But now, they are mere talking points that a recruiter or hiring manager may or may not choose to believe. My only defense is "trust me, I was actually pretty good back in the day".

And that brings me to my main point. In the digital age where bits and bytes are erased on a whim, it's never been more important to own what you do.

I'm glad that for the past several years, all of the work that I've been able to produce and work on, is my own.

I've spent the past 8 years working on various funded startups as a co-founder and all of that work is still alive and well on the internet. There are TechCrunch articles, Crunchbase pages and Product Hunt badges to show proof of work.

And while some of those products may eventually disappear too, one thing is clear: if you don’t own your work, you don’t really get to control whether you can share it or not.

Most professional software is built for someone else. It lives on their servers, under their domains, behind their auth systems, and inside their business decisions. When those things change, and they always do, your work goes with them.

The only projects that consistently do survive are the ones you control.

• Personal tools.
• Side projects.
• Blogs.
• Open-source repos.

Anything where you own the domain, the code, and the hosting. Those don’t disappear unless you decide they do.

This blog for example is going on 10+ years now. And while it isn't the most advanced blogging engine, I did build the entire thing from the ground up, and I have no plans of taking it offline, even if no new content were ever to be published again.

The irony isn't lost on me that the work I got paid the most for, the enterprise systems, the client projects, the products that generated actual revenue, those are mostly gone.

Meanwhile, this blog that isn't really monetized is still here somehow getting thousands of people to read it every month. The side projects I built on weekends outlasted the companies I spent years at.

That's not a lesson about money or success though. It's just the reality of what persists. The things you own don't disappear because a board decided to pivot or because a domain registration lapsed in an acquisition.

They disappear only when you stop caring. And maybe that's the real difference. Not ownership in the legal sense, but in the existential one. The work you choose to maintain is the work that gets to exist with your name on it.