Why My Portfolio Now Has a Shelf for Things I Never Finished

There's a page on this site called Shelf. Not “Selected Work”, not “Archive”, not “Things I've Shipped”. Shelf. At the time of writing it holds eleven projects: four finished, two paused, three dormant, one handed over to somebody else, and one that is dead and buried with the reason carved on the headstone.

A collaborator saw it last month and asked, kindly, whether I worried it made me look flaky. I said no, then thought about it for four days, which is how I know it's worth a post.

The highlights reel problem

A personal site usually drifts into being a shop window: three best things, polished, dated, presented as if they arrived that way. I understand the instinct. You want to look like someone who finishes things. You want a visitor to think, “there's a person on top of it all.”

The trouble is that a highlights reel is a lie of omission, and visitors can smell it. Everyone who makes things has a drawer of half-built stuff. Showing only the finished four implies either that the rest doesn't exist (untrue) or that it's shameful (also untrue). Meanwhile the person most likely to care about your abandoned mapping project — the one human in the country who'd say “hang on, I've got a fix for that” — is staring at a page that pretends it never happened.

What a paused project says about you

Unfinished work is evidence, and usually good evidence. It shows what you're curious about when nobody's paying. It reveals the shape of your taste before it's been sanded down into something presentable.

A shelf of half-built things tells a visitor: this person starts, this person explores, this person has more ideas than evenings. For a potential collaborator that's a more useful signal than a tidy row of logos, because it tells them what you'd be like to work with on something that isn't finished yet — which is every project, for most of its life.

It also saves you from believing a portfolio has to be a verdict. It's a workshop. Workshops have offcuts.

Status labels that don't grovel

The word “abandoned” does a lot of work, and most of it is bad. You don't need to apologise for a project. You need to describe it accurately. The labels I use:

• Live — it exists, people use it, I still maintain it.
• Paused — stopped on purpose, with a reason and a restart condition.
• Dormant — not dead, just quiet; I'll come back when the mood or the data turns up.
• Handed over — someone else runs it now, and here's who.
• Closed — I stopped, I'm not restarting, and here's what I learned.

The trick is that each label implies a next step or a reason. “Paused — waiting on a parts delivery” reads very differently from “abandoned”. One is a project with a future tense. The other is an apology wearing a project's coat.

Writing a note that stays useful

A dead project is still a useful object if you leave the right notes. On every shelf entry, finished or not, I try to include:

• What works. Even if it's 20% of the thing. Name the good bit.
• What doesn't. Be specific. “The sync layer falls over above about 200 records” is useful. “Didn't work out” is not.
• Where I stopped, and why. A date, a reason, a blocker.
• What I'd do next. One sentence. It gives a curious visitor something to grab hold of.
• What I'd hand you. Files, sketches, a half-written spec, a repo. If someone wants to pick it up, don't make them start from zero.

Five lines. Ten minutes. That's the whole cost of making an abandoned thing legible, and it turns a gap in your portfolio into a conversation.

How it looks on chrisjm.co.uk

Each entry gets a status label, a one-line description and a last-touched date. The last-touched date is the bit people comment on most. It's oddly reassuring to see “last touched 14 March 2026” on something nobody's pretending is alive.

The entries that get the most replies are consistently the paused ones. Someone emails about the font experiment. Someone else offers a fix for the tile renderer. A mate in Manchester asks whether she can pinch the idea for a community archive. None of that happens if the shelf stays hidden, and all of it is worth more to me than the appearance of being tidy.

Start with three

If your site currently shows only the finished stuff, don't plan a big reveal. Pick three: one paused, one dormant, one you properly killed. Give each a status label, a last-touched date and those five lines. Then see what happens.

My guess is nothing dramatic — nobody will gasp in the street. But someone will read it and think, “oh, they're a person who makes things”, which is the whole point of having a site in the first place. And you'll stop carrying the drawer around in your head.