Most developers clean house. Archive, privatize, delete. The logic writes itself: that code is embarrassing, I've moved on, I don't want to be judged by 2013 me.

I get it. I just think it's wrong.

My GitHub still has tools I've been working on from 2012. Scrapers held together with string. Half-finished tools. Commented-out logic that made sense at 2am and looks completely unhinged in daylight. Every single one is still there, and every single one is intentional.

Software is almost unique in how aggressively it erases its own history. Architects keep sketches. Writers keep drafts. Musicians keep demos. Developers delete the moment something feels dated, and the industry has quietly normalized that as professionalism. It isn't. It's just vanity with better PR.

The record of how someone solved a problem, especially badly, is more instructive than any polished portfolio piece. It shows the reasoning. The constraints. The moment someone realized a better path existed and took it. You cannot fake that arc, and you cannot reconstruct it after the fact. Either you left the breadcrumbs or you didn't.

There is also a harder reason I keep it up: accountability. Anyone who wants to understand how I used to think can go look. The progression is not always flattering. There are approaches I have since abandoned, frameworks I would never reach for today, and at least one repo where I clearly had no idea what I was doing. Leaving it visible is a form of honesty that most curated professional profiles quietly sidestep.

Legacy is not a highlight reel. It is a true record. The pivots, the dead ends, and the ideas that aged badly are as much a part of the story as anything that worked.

If someone finds my old code and learns from it, great. If they use it to evaluate me, fine. If they use it as a cautionary example of what not to do, that works too. The work happened. It was real. I'm not going to pretend otherwise just because I've gotten better.

Leave the receipts. That's what accountability looks like.