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Updating a Portfolio: An Inquiry Into Ethics and Employability

Let’s say you have a web portfolio of some web sites that you built.

And let’s say you’ve found a few errors that you didn’t catch in 2002.

Maybe even throw in a little obsolete code, which wasn’t actually obsolete at the time.

…Is is ethical to clean it up? Is it ethical to present something that, for all intents and purposes, looks and functions almost exactly the same as it did back then, yet has been tweaked to fix small errors?

In other words: is it okay for me to fix my mistakes?

By jae

jae lethe (he/she/they) is a blogger, musician, artist, poet, web developer/designer, armchair philosophizer, teller of tales, and gadabout. Also, something he calls a "behavioral artist." (Not sure.) She has plans. BIG plans.

Among the things that he has done for a laugh are minor fractures, cuts, scrapes, and various scabs. Though she's quick to point out that they're no imbecile, we're fairly certain that he thinks the word means some kind of medieval pharmacist.

This is her latest home on teh internets - where jae stores their swear words, when they're not hurling them at the sun in vain.

4 replies on “Updating a Portfolio: An Inquiry Into Ethics and Employability”

I think it’s perfectly ethical. I think it shows that you’ve grown talent-wise and realize the mistakes that were made. If a potential employer saw the errors he might think that you didn’t know what you were doing. It’s almost like having a typo in your resume, since your portfoliio is a part of your CV. If it really bothered you, you could always tell them about the changes you made in order to highlight how far you’ve come since then. Besides, they’re hiring the 2006 you, not the 2002 you.

Like the other commenter said, if there were mistakes in your resume, you’d fix ’em. It’s like any other document, to me. If you found mistakes, you’d fix them. If you are using it to represent what you did in 2002, I wouldn’t go as far as to change it so much that you are using the most up to date stuff (rather than 2002), but if it’s not date-representative, do what you want. :D

Learning is a process, and you’re allowed to learn as you go, and can say just that to them too. You can compare newer-older websites to illustrate what you’ve learned since then, those fine details a newbie wouldn’t be able to do. You just gotta freeze-frame your current knowledge and showcase that off.

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