They mainly show what’s possible if you

• don’t have a deadline
• don’t have business constantly pivoting what the project should be like, often last minute
• don’t have to pass security testing
• don’t have customers who constantly demand something else
• don’t have constantly shifting priorities
• don’t have tight budget restrictions where you have to be accountable to business for every single hour of work
• don’t have to maintain the project for 15-20 years
• don’t have a large project scope at all
• don’t have a few dozen people working on it, spread over multiple teams or even multiple clusters
• don’t have non-technical staff dictating technical implementations
• don’t have to chase the buzzword of the day (e.g. Blockchain or AI)
• don’t have to work on some useless project that mostly exists for political reasons
• can work on the product as long as you want, when you want and do whatever you want while working at it

Comparing hobby work that people do for fun with professional software and pinning the whole difference on skill is missing the point.

The same developer might produce an amazing 64k demo in their spare time while building mass-produced garbage-level software at work. Because at work you aren’t doing what you want (or even what you can) but what you are ordered to.

In most setups, if you deliver something that wasn’t asked for (even if it might be better) will land you in trouble if you do it repeatedly.

In my spare time I made the Fairberry smartphone keyboard attachment and now I am working on the PEPit physiotherapy game console, so that chronically ill kids can have fun while doing their mindnumbingly monotonous daily physiotherapy routine.

These are projects that dozens of people are using in their daily life.

In my day job I am a glorified code monkey keeping the backend service for some customer loyalty app running. Hardly impressive.

If an app is buggy, it’s almost always bad management decisions, not low developer skill.