Michael Anthony Wright
Web Developer and PHP/PERL [and soon to be ASP.net!] Programmer
Portfolio

Maintaining a portfolio has been one of the most difficult issues that I have to face everytime I need to show off my abilities.  It's not that I have not worked on some impressive sites, but rather, it is simply the nature of the media that I work in.

Unlike art or print media, the web is not static.  New techonologies, new styles and new content is always replacing the work and effort that developers spend so much labor and love on.  A site that I built a year ago is not likely to be the same today, and the site I build today will not stay constant for long.  This is the beauty of the Internet; This is the bain of the web developer's portfolio.

This fact is compounded when you are but one developer employed by a company and positioned in a team that develops these new media masterpieces.  While you may at sometime leave the company or team behind you to pursue new goals, they will labor on, and the fruits of your efforts will change because of it.  So there's a good chance that between the client's desire to stay fresh and the company's desire to keep moving forward, the site you sink so much time into will eventually lose all traces of your handiwork.  This is true whether you are a front end HTML/JavaScript/CSS developer, or some flavor of back end programmer.

And as id that where not enough, there are the countless number of projects that you might develop that are never seen by the world at large, hidden behind passwords and tucked away on company intranets.  It can be hard to account for months of advancement when the only way to provide someone with a glimpse of that work is to violate the very trust with one company that you are trying to earn in the next.

Despite this, I have tried hard to provide a small sampling of my work.  I have in all cases attempted to provide direct links to some of the sites that I have developed in my career: