From Rob Sheldon
What are you going to do, stand up in a coffee house one night and show off your code on a projector? “And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where I got the brilliant idea to use my new mutex to manage simultaneous multithreaded access to the same chunk without the risk of a race condition!” There’s wild cheering, somebody buys you drinks, and you get to go home with a cute girl who thinks your brain is super hot.
Looking for external validation will always lead to depression. When I’ve done some good work that I’m excited about, I do like to tell someone, but it’s not so much for validation but to get someone as excited as I am about the tiny bit of awesome I’ve added to the world.