Whenever I would finish a web development project I would take a screenshot of the homepage and maybe a few unique interior pages of the site. I kept most of them just for posterity and so I could reference them later, but sometimes they were used as part of award show submissions or in case studies to show off what me and my web development teammates could do.
I tended to keep all of the screenshots and videos organized in a folder on my personal computer, backed up by a cloud service or local storage system. Unfortunately, when moving from one machine to another a few years ago, a few folders fell through the cracks and, by the time I noticed, my backup was already out of date and there was no way to recover the screenshots that I had lost. Although I had a few screenshots from projects starting in 2020 stored in my Apple Photos library, everything from the years before that was MIA.
This was sort of a bummer because there were a lot of projects that I worked on where, although they served their purpose at the time, maybe a few years later a company would drastically change the design, or even replace my work with a whole new front-end by another developer. Some of these websites don’t even exist anymore.
Other projects were done using Adobe Flash, and although the amazing Ruffle project has revived and made some Flash work accessible at places like the Internet Archive, the way I was making Flash projects that loaded assets from multiple SWF files didn’t always work correctly in Ruffle (RIP my 2006 portfolio website).
But in early 2026 I found an old LaCie 500MB external USB drive sitting in my desk drawer and just out of curiosity I plugged it into my Mac to see what was on it. It had a treasure trove of past computer files! I found a folder that included screenshots and videos that I took going all the way back to 2007.
Sharing is Caring
Maybe it was in part because I thought that I had lost all traces of this work, I decided to A. upload all the screenshots to my Apple Photos library (that’s backed up in several places), and B. upload them to my website’s asset storage so I could write a blog post about a few of my favorite projects. But there are so many cool designs in here and I wanted to share some context around them, so I got to writing blog posts about my pick of my favorite projects.
I started a new article section, called Work Archive, and here's a list of all of all of the blog posts that came out of this cache of screenshots:
For each blog post I tried to share enough context to explain why the project was created, what my part in the project was, and maybe a few extra thoughts I had around it.
I tried to share names of folks I collaborated with, but to be honest, I don’t remember the details around who was the main copywriter or web designer for each project and I would rather omit that info than get it wrong.
I tried to recall details around the technology or design concepts behind each project, but I also erred on the side of keeping potentially sensitive information out. My general thought here is that anything that can be found on the Internet Archive or that was available to the public was okay to share, and in some cases a UI was shared while content was redacted.
Finally, most of these posts stay on the positive side, and while every project has its warts, the point here wasn’t to get into any of that. If you’re curious enough, I will happily share war stories over a coffee. Some stories might need something even stronger 🥃
It was a great nostalgic trip for me to go through these images and I hope other developers who see this can relate to some of our thinking at the time of these projects. And while we're at it, if anybody else has any similar projects to share, I would love to see them.