folkways.si.edu is the Smithsonian Folkways digital archive, the online presence for one of the country's most important folk music recording catalogs. I worked on it as an internship at the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C., a place I'd grown up just outside of, in Northern Virginia. It was the summer before I knew I wanted to be a software engineer.
I came in with a BA in Anthropology and no career direction. My dad had built a successful software business in government contracts, so I'd been close to software my whole life without planning to do it myself. The internship listing wanted web-development familiarity; I had enough adjacent exposure to apply.
What the work was
The site had hundreds of musician profile pages for the artists Folkways had recorded over the decades. My job was to update them and keep the site running:
- Musician profile updates. Adding new entries, refreshing existing ones, keeping artist information current.
- General WordPress maintenance. The low-stakes content and admin work an internship gets handed because it teaches the surface area without breaking anything important.
It was my introduction to WordPress, and through WordPress, my introduction to web development as something a person could actually do for a living.
The room I was working in
The work environment was a folk music recording studio and digital archive. I held the original vinyl pressing (the very first copy ever pressed) of "This Land Is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie. That was the building I was learning WordPress in.
How a BA in Anthropology turned into this
Mid-internship, my mentor told me to build a personal website. I did. There was nothing in the portfolio yet except the internship, but the act of building my own site (picking a domain, designing the layout, writing the copy) was the moment something clicked. Web development was a thing I could keep doing, and a thing I wanted to.
That first portfolio site has been rebuilt many times since: different stacks, different design eras, eventually adding case studies and a blog. The portfolio you're looking at is several generations downstream of the one my mentor told me to build that summer. The line from that internship to the rest of my career is the straightest line in my professional history.
This isn't a project with bells and whistles. It's the most foundational one on this whole portfolio.