I first got into web design in late high school, creating a shoddily made blog on my own. It was incredibly fun but I also hated the end result after a few months. Later that year, I embarked on another quest: make a better website. I wasn't really sure what I meant by "better" but I started by putting more planning and thought into the overall color pallete and design of the site, taking inspiration from other developers and finding my creative style when it came to webdev. Once it came down to actually making it work, I prompty forgot about the site. One of the most appealing parts of developing software is designing it. To me, it was like a coloring book— almost theraputic. Yet it still wasn't functional. Nevertheless, I proudly showed the site off: the animations and aria-labels some of my best work so far. Over the next two years I would tell myself that I would fix my website someday. It wasn't until this past week I actually got around to doing it. Revisiting code I made as a high schooler was an interesting experience. Struggling through vague commit messages trying to figure out what they were for made me feel like a reverse engineer. In a way, it was useful noticing the sloppy code and lack of detail put into it. I not only fixed the functionality but the organization and directory structure as well. It has been three years since I first started learning web development. You may have noticied I linked my older site to this webpage. The site contains blog posts detailing a few key memories of junior year. Since then, I started my senior year, led the computer science club, got into UT, went to prom, graduated high school, and moved out— a lot of key memories and milestones in my life. Once I got to UT, however, my confidence as a developer and computer scientist began to diminish. I was plagued with classic imposter syndrome, only made worse by being suddenly faced with classes far more rigorous than before. It was during this low point that I made the decision to get the ball rolling again on side projects, the first step being my old portfolio website. Upon returning to it, I immediately began to dig into the code. Admittedly, it was all I could think about for a couple of days. Once it was tidied up and I was happy with the final result, it was time to sit down and add to it. It was then that I actually began to contemplate how much things had changed in a seemingly short time. Revisiting the old code reminded me of a time when I thought college was far away. The nostaligia finally sank in, but so did the realization that I have learned so much. I was faster at fixing bugs, more efficient at organizing my code, better at finding solutions to problems. After having to figure out problems in my programming assignments, I was more resilient when I encountered something I couldn't immediately fix. I didn't realize this while I was actually working on the assingments— granted, I was also sleep deprived and stressed— but the challenge had made me "better". It wasn't just the code that had changed. I had too. I'm glad I made the decision not to delete or erase older sites and projects. It reminds me that my journey in comptuer science is uniquely mine, and not to compare it to those of others. They are, in a way, my own little internet time capsules.