thomasreggi

Vincent van Gogh was notoriously unable to enjoy his fame. It was only after his death that he became the renowned figure we know today. I am curious whether this phenomenon of post-mortem recognition is also observed within the software community. With the advent of the internet, I wonder if there are coders who have innovated and remained unheard, fervently writing about their ideas with no audience, until their work is eventually discovered over time and gains notoriety. I can envision an engineer who creates a GitHub repository that receives no stars during their lifetime, only to strike a chord with the masses after their passing. Are there any notable software engineers that only garnered recognition after they died?

I have written so much javascript over the years, specifically nodejs. I have tons of folders and files of code that is in some half-baked state. It's safe to say I'm overwhelmed and unorganized. I feel like I write the same couple of functions over and over again, reinventing the wheel again and again.

I'm reaching out to the community looking for some alternative. I want to write code, test it, document it, and manage deps all in one place, and forget about it. I want naming conventions for files and folders as well as functions themselves. I'd love if every function I write was accessible, and nothing I ever write was locked away in some file or class. I'd love some way to manage all the code I write.

Does anyone else feel this way? Am I just too lazy to make things npm modules, or is there something larger at play here? Is this all an IDE / tooling issue?

What can I do to lower the barrier-of-entry to just write code, and stop fiddling with files, folders, modules, repos, function naming, etc?

I don't feel like anything exists to maintain all the code you write over a lifetime, rather than on a project-by-project basis.