--- title: 'Your portfolio is a timeline of your growth' date: 2023-05-16 excerpt: 'At some point in your life, you will look back on the work you did when you were just getting started with a new skill, and see everything you did wrong. Let''s talk about how to channel that feeling for good' tags: [newsletter, design, career] canonical: https://mikebifulco.com/newsletter/portfolio-as-timeline --- # Your portfolio is a timeline of your growth At some point in your life, you will look back on the work you did when you were just getting started with a new skill, and see everything you did wrong. You'll see the mistakes you made, the things you didn't know, and the things you didn't even *know* you didn't know. You may have felt this already. Maybe it's that design project from high school or university or bootcamp, or the first website you ever made. I think we all have a tendency to see our old work as embarrassing. I'd like to offer up an alternative perspective. You've come a long, long way. We all have. Looking back on your portfolio and seeing how far you've come is a great way to to see how much you've grown, which is a process that can be imperceptible day-to-day. It's the reason I called this newsletter *Tiny Improvements.* Focus on being an incrementally better version of yourself every day, and those tiny improvements will add up to something incredible over time. **Your homework this week:** Look back at your past-you; find some examples of your oldest work, and think about how you've grown. If you're feeling brave, reply to this message with a link to your oldest work, and your thoughts on it today, and I'll share mine too. --- ## Where I've been learning lately - 🌳 [Unheard Roots](https://unheardroots.com/) is a wonderful newsletter that I've come upon recently. They share stories & strategies about game-changing startups that you may not have heard of before. I really enjoyed their post about Reddit. - 📈 [Growth.design](https://growth.design/) is a fantastic collection of extremely well-illustrated UX case studies from products we've all used. It's super interesting to see them detail dark patterns, like Adobe's Offboarding process -- where customer satisfaction is sacrificed for the sake of revenue. - 📼 [Theo - t3dotdogg](https://www.youtube.com/@t3dotgg) on YouTube has been making some *insanely* insightful videos on building companies and products with TypeScript in 2023. I have found his videos to be extremely helpful while building my new startup. ## Some things I've made, just for you - 👾 Over at APIs You Won't Hate, we just dropped a new newsletter: [Laravel is Harmful](https://apisyouwonthate.com/newsletter/larvel-is-harmful/). If you're into building or using APIs, you're gonna love APIs You Won't Hate. Consider subscribing - our newsletter goes out twice a month. - 🎨 We just launched a shiny new estimate generator for interior painting projects over at [Craftwork](https://craftwork.com/estimate). It's a simple-looking wizard, and building it exemplifies one of the most important lessons I've learned in my career: **simple is hard.** We'll be iterating on this tool quickly over the next few weeks, so if you have any feedback, we would love to hear it. --- And that's it for me this week. It turns out building a startup, publishing this newsletter, and maintaining a dev community is a lot to balance - but I'm loving every minute of it. Thanks so much for reading. Keep doing your thing - I'm proud of you. ## More from mikebifulco.com - [Content creation workflow: my writing process](https://mikebifulco.com/posts/content-creation-workflow-my-writing-process) - [First principles for UX design](https://mikebifulco.com/newsletter/first-principles-for-ux-design) - [Intellectual humility: how to be wrong productively](https://mikebifulco.com/newsletter/intellectual-humility-and-how-to-be-wrong) --- Written by Mike Bifulco. Originally published at https://mikebifulco.com/newsletter/portfolio-as-timeline