Updating a Portfolio: An Inquiry Into Ethics and Employability

[transmothra]

Let's say you have a web portfolio of some web sites that you built.

And let's say you've found a few errors that you didn't catch in 2002.

Maybe even throw in a little obsolete code, which wasn't actually obsolete at the time.

...Is is ethical to clean it up? Is it ethical to present something that, for all intents and purposes, looks and functions almost exactly the same as it did back then, yet has been tweaked to fix small errors?

In other words: is it okay for me to fix my mistakes?

Comments

[lunarchk.livejournal.com]

I think it's perfectly ethical. I think it shows that you've grown talent-wise and realize the mistakes that were made. If a potential employer saw the errors he might think that you didn't know what you were doing. It's almost like having a typo in your resume, since your portfoliio is a part of your CV. If it really bothered you, you could always tell them about the changes you made in order to highlight how far you've come since then.

Besides, they're hiring the 2006 you, not the 2002 you.