You seem to be saying that you don't feel you're succeeding unless you have a creator-level social presence with fans oohing and ahhing about your coding prowess.

Sorry to be stark about it, but that's the problem right there. Why do you need to be singularly noticed? Most people in general aren't. It's not a rut. It's a gazillion people who are all aiming at being at the top of the curve, and a certain smaller portion of them with the funds to make an attractive package with their dreams that will be shown forever as a YouTube suggested video.

The most productive folks out there aren't dividing their time trying to please an audience through entertainment. They're usually part of a team and take pride in the product they and their team are working on. Much less pressure than judging your value in comparison to an online celebrity.

> You seem to be saying that you don't feel you're succeeding unless you have a creator-level social presence with fans oohing and ahhing about your coding prowess.

Not even remotely and I'm not sure how you read that. I'm not really worried about "succeeding" at this point in my career as a programmer.

I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting other people to enjoy the things you've created as a hobbyist. It's a very human experience and completely normal in other hobbies. If I were into gardening and I gave my neighbor the vegetables/fruit from my harvest I don't think anyone would read that as wanting to be a celebrity or whatever you're suggesting. I'm not looking for fame. I just want to make something that someone besides myself can enjoy.

Compare these two things, though. Would you be upset if strangers from around the globe don't pay heed to your beautiful garden? Friends, sure. Family, sure. Neighbours even. As for strangers all over the globe, I wouldn't care much about their opinion of my garden. They're busy with their own gardens, or admiring their friends', neighbours' etc. gardens. You may differ on that.

I get your point, but I still see it as trying to wring some lovin' from strangers on the Internet. That's the entire MO of sites like TikTok, so it clearly is a thing.

It doesn't matter to me whether its a stranger on the internet or a friend or neighbor, truly. If I had a friend who had a problem that I could help solve with software, I'd already be down that path (and I have many times before). I don't have the community that you're describing.

FWIW I don't have TikTok or any SM profile besides my Github account, and even with that I've never done much to promote anything I've built.

This is more about having a muse than it is getting popularity.

From a different era (George Kennan): ...at times, where I have put my word in, well, it's always like shooting at a bell with a slingshot. Sometimes you hit it, sometimes you don't. If you don't hit it there's total silence, if you do hit it, it rings loudly. But occasionally I have hit it...

I would not worry too much about the total silence; that's the nature of globally-networked attention. (unless you prefer bell-ringing to programming, in which case change-ringing or some other hobby might indeed be best to take up)

> everything has been done.

In computing and engineering, almost all "new" developments are actually variations or recombinations of things that have already been done.

BUT it's not just computing! That is also true of all the other arts, crafts, literature, music, ....

There is nothing wrong with this! It can be fun and rewarding to experiment this way, and some of the variations and recombinations are sufficiently novel and/or valuable that they are taken up by others. You just have to try the experiment and see where it goes.

An interesting form of variation is to remove something, or revert to something that was almost abandoned years ago. There have been a number of interesting projects recently that do this - the uxn virtual machine, the Gemini internet protocol, even the SerenityOS operating system. All three of these projects have attracted many developers besides their original authors.

Another form of variation is scale. Pick something insanely ambitious -- that seems to require a huge corporation -- and scale it down so you can do it all by yourself. The marginalia search engine is created and operated by one guy and runs on a computer in his living room.

It is fun and instructive to identify the strategies other developers have used. I thought of a few more:

combination - The World Wide Web is a combination of hypertext documents and the Internet, which had both been around for a long time when Tim Berners-Lee thought of combining them.

change one thing - Almost every week, several new text editors are announced on Hacker News. Most have one unique feature that distinguishes it from all the others. It might be internal - a new data struture for storing text buffers. Or it might be in the user interface or appearance - a new method for sizing and placing windows when another buffer is opened.

change the programming language - A variation on the above. How can you do X in language Y? Can you get an improvement by using a particular language feature?

make it smaller - How small can you make a text editor, language compiler, chess playing program, ray tracer ... ?

Thanks, I appreciate the encouragement and this gives me a new perspective to look at things from, which is exactly what I needed. Hope you have a happy new year.

> everything has been done

It may have been partially, "someway" done - just that. "Everything" would be available only if you accept its current state of quality and features. Which in a way defies the whole spirit of engineering (you create tools to overcome a "current state").