Folkways Digital Archive

The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage maintains folkways.si.edu — the digital archive for the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings catalog. A long-running cultural-preservation platform that exists to make sound recordings of vanishing cultural traditions findable and accessible.

I interned with the Center in summer 2015 (July–August), contributing to web development on the folkways.si.edu codebase. The site runs on WordPress; the engineering work spanned content-template adjustments through to the kind of bug fixes that keep a cultural archive accessible to researchers, educators, and the listening public.

This was my first formal engineering work in a context where the institution mattered as much as the code. The Smithsonian's mandate isn't quarterly user growth — it's cultural preservation on a 50-year horizon. The codebase reflects that: long-lived, maintained for continuity, stable in a way most software isn't asked to be.

[PLACEHOLDER — fuller detail on the contributions made and the broader Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage context coming.]