Web Development

How did your contributions impact the world? I'm not talking about Wikipedia worthy projects or products. If you didn't do what you did, how would the world be different? Let's say you worked on data validation tools in tax software for the IRS. Maybe you prevented thousands of people from the stress and struggle of bogus audits. Or maybe you worked on compilers for a defunct architecture, and your optimizer saved billions of watt-hours of energy in wasted cycles over the years

I can look back at my career and point to moments where I've made a small dent in the history of the technologies I worked with, yet my name isn't attached to any. I've also worked on personal projects that are mostly defunct but had thousands of users in their heyday, but because I used a handle for many of them (for reasons) the people who might remember what I did will never know my name when I'm gone.

I'm good with knowing I made some sort of difference without being personally remembered. But that's just me, and I think it's important to recognize the ways you want to be recognized.

With that said, name recognition on for-pay work is rare. You're probably out of luck getting that recognition for your previous work, but there are things you can do now. If you have personal projects, post them on GitHub and advertise them on relevant forums. If you don't, consider contributing to an OSS project. With Github's Arctic vault program, your PRs to a major project may outlive humanity. If you don't want to work on personal projects at all, consider finding a job where you can be paid to contribute to OSS, or ask your employer if you can spend 20% time giving back to libraries your company depends on.