Most skills have an easier progression to start with, and as you get better the harder progressions get easier to pick up. It's no different with programming either.
Though, the feeling of "I've not accomplished enough" is somehow greater and a lot more common in programmers.
I can't speak for everyone but for me it does get to me, I stop coding for a while when it does and I can't do that for the day job but I just stop going close to my workstation at times. I'm not providing a solution here but I think you should still read through.
On most days I just end up re-building older projects to just distract me from this feeling, and it has worked since the mind moves to something else after a bit.
The recent feeling of being an imposter or more like not having built anything significant is mostly due to my current mentality shift where I wish to try to be an indie hacker again and the problem with me is that the separation of "I need to do this for money" and "This is being done for fun" is very hard for me to do.
You see, most of what I've built over the years was done for fun, none of those projects were ever built to show off but just to be there as references of things that caught my attention. You think the world needed another Typing Test? Nah, I built one cause it made me curious as to how the typing animation was achieved by MonkeyType and I sat down to figure it out without looking at their code or to be put simply, reverse engineering it.
Which is one of the better things that I can say about myself, I'm good at reverse engineering. It's a skill that does help with whatever I'm doing but i'm also limited in terms of original ideas. Most of my ideas revolve around improving existing software and since a lot of them are closed source, I end up having to build them from the ground up.
The idea of moving away from a day job and jumping into the world of indie hacking though has made me rethink how I code, it's now about competing for users and making $X ARR / MRR, and that's just not something I'm able to think properly about. Might just take longer but will need to think hard about it.
I've been applying to other companies that are in the open source world, and hire remotely worldwide. Haven't gotten a response from most of them and if I have gotten a first round, there's been no response to my follow ups for it, which proves that the company or humans working there don't really care about it so , that's that.
The mentality I should be aiming at should be a separation of what I do, I should very clearly define the boundaries of what's fun and what's professional and work on the project while keeping that in mind. If I'm unable to do that, then it's going to be really hard for me to ever get to the goal of being financially free and still be able to work on programming projects, treating them as art.
I could be selling templates, if there's people out there who like my typography centered UX, which I think is very niche but if there's anyone out there who thinks that they would be willing to pay for it, do let me know.
Remembering why I started coding actually helped get me back to normal quite a few times. I code because I find it cool, there's things I don't understand so I sit down to think how it could've been made. This is not limited to code but anything that I find cool, it could be about suspended bridges for all I care. The fun of being able to decode all of this mentally and build it by yourself is something that really stimulates my brain.
The attempt to simply answer the question, "Can I also make this?" is what has lead to 80% of what I've built.
Did you need another color conversion library in node? nah. I built one just to dabble in the math behind it. Another static site generator? Lol, nope. Same reason, i had fun making one An on the fly go lang CLI builder? This was probably useful but I found more use to it that others so , still worth it
Going through these things again made me realise why I do it and what I'm doing wrong. Finding a balance between work and fun is something that I'll have to master to be able to be at peace.
That's about it, there's not much more to say here since there might not be much value that I can provide with posts like these.
Adios!