What's in a Portfolio?

What am I supposed to put in my portfolio? Ideally, I’d have several projects that I built while learning as well as links to past employers’ websites that I contributed to. I should also have some testimonials from people I’ve worked with in the past, but I don’t have any of this.

My professional history is too far in the past. My previous employers have either been bought / merged / closed or have moved far past my contributions.

What I do have is over 175 pens at CodePen.io, 27 repositories at GitHub, and 17 "projects" I completed for freeCodeCamp. None of this is professional-quality code worthy of a portfolio.

In short, everything I’ve ever done to show my skills or experience is either gone or an embarassment, and that makes it difficult to actively look for work right now.

This is very disheartening… I’ve been working with computers professionally since 1990 and focused on Web Development since 2001, but I’ve got nothing to show for it.

Nothing right now, at least…

To quote the mantra of the excellent Shop Talk Show podcast "Just Build Websites!" In that vein, I’ve got some ideas for sites to build for the sole purpose of putting them in my portfolio. My first portfolio project, a search engine, is in progress.