I built my first website in 2011 after moving from Boulder to Denver, and by 2012 had started Union in Design as a side hustle doing web design and development for friends, local businesses, and non-profits. This site — hand-coded in Bootstrap, jQuery, and a lot of Photoshop — was my portfolio during that stretch, built before I'd ever written a line of React or touched a database. It's preserved below, untouched, as the actual index.html running in an iframe rather than a screenshot.
The site's own words put it best: "I've come a long way from my humble roots as a yoga teacher, building websites in Dreamweaver and using Photoshop and the Adobe Suite to manipulate images and create logos and such for my private clients... I worked on and off as a freelancer for several years, and went as far as I could as a self-taught designer developer before deciding to make a career as a developer." That decision led to certificates from the University of Denver in Full Stack Web Development and Data Visualization & Analytics, and a full-time developer role in 2018 — the path this current portfolio represents the other end of.
Getting this old site back online took a small archaeology project. I pointed Claude at the original 2015 codebase, my current resume, and an old Next.js 13 template I had sitting around from an earlier attempt at rebuilding this portfolio — three artifacts from three different eras of this site's history. Rather than starting from scratch, we scanned the old template's structure and content, migrated it from JavaScript to TypeScript, and upgraded it onto Next.js 16, carrying forward the parts worth keeping and replacing the parts that weren't. This 2015 site's page itself was left completely alone — no rewrite, no modernization — because the whole point of keeping it around is that it's exactly what shipped back then.
This is the original 2015 index.html, running as-is in an iframe — not a screenshot.