I wholeheartedly agree, and in retrospect I wish I had taken more screenshots of projects after I’d finished them. I made a number of small game mods in high school. None of them will run now (well, at least not without modifying and recompiling) as I hardcoded my local filesystem paths into the code, and I’ve reinstalled my OS several times since. It sure would be nostalgic to take a trip down memory lane, but it’s just not practical. Though it has been fun re-reading my absolutely terrible source code.
I have a load of school work in ClarisWorks 1.0 file formats. When I got my first Mac, I bought AppleWorks with it, on the assumption that it would be able to open them, but it couldn’t open files that old. I probably have ClarisWorks on floppy disks somewhere, now that Windows 3.11 runs in DOSBox I can probably recover them, but it taught me an important lesson about not putting anything I care about in proprietary file formats.
For a while at the last agency where I worked, we had a standard practice of maintaining per-client blogs where we shared the work as it developed. Invaluable when it was later time to dredge up a screenshot for a presentation.
Taking screenshots of your projects is a wildly valuable habit. Most projects bitrot, but a JPEG/PNG is forever!
I wholeheartedly agree, and in retrospect I wish I had taken more screenshots of projects after I’d finished them. I made a number of small game mods in high school. None of them will run now (well, at least not without modifying and recompiling) as I hardcoded my local filesystem paths into the code, and I’ve reinstalled my OS several times since. It sure would be nostalgic to take a trip down memory lane, but it’s just not practical. Though it has been fun re-reading my absolutely terrible source code.
I have a load of school work in ClarisWorks 1.0 file formats. When I got my first Mac, I bought AppleWorks with it, on the assumption that it would be able to open them, but it couldn’t open files that old. I probably have ClarisWorks on floppy disks somewhere, now that Windows 3.11 runs in DOSBox I can probably recover them, but it taught me an important lesson about not putting anything I care about in proprietary file formats.
What would be the equivalent of screenshots for cli / non-GUI projects? Asciinema videos?
Yeah those work pretty well. I often drop in static screenshots of a terminal or animated GIFs of it running.
You remind me that copy and paste from macOS terminal into macOS text editor preserves the colours by converting to rich text
Screencasts, GIFs, and “Save as PDF” are your friends too.
Also sometimes, and at least for me, the majority of the time, it’s okay for old projects to be forgotten.
For a while at the last agency where I worked, we had a standard practice of maintaining per-client blogs where we shared the work as it developed. Invaluable when it was later time to dredge up a screenshot for a presentation.