Why keep the old work?

Old work is useful evidence, even when I would make every decision differently now.

It is tempting to clean up the past until it looks like a straight line. Mine is not. There are abandoned directions, overbuilt systems, ideas that arrived too early, and ideas that were simply not very good.

I keep some of it because the distance is useful. Old work shows what I noticed then, what I missed, and which problems have followed me into better tools and different jobs.

This archive is not a victory lap. It is a trail.