Just look into a some nearly arbitrary industry/department where Excel is used extensively. Replacing some "cobbled together" Excel workbooks with properly implemented applications very often yields a lot of low-hanging fruits where you can "add value with code".
How would you get people to trust you to do this and make a solution that they can maintain in the long term? It's hard for me to envision an organization accepting this offer.
I know people for whom what I described is the daily job.
Of course, the respective organization has to ensure that there do exist programmers who can maintain the software (but having to maintain it or adding new features from time to time is typically a lot less work than writing the original software from scratch).
I usually make workflows fully automated or save so much time that people just don't want to go back.
If I cannot automate the full workflow I try to get to a solution that saves as much resources as possible without actually needing the "solution" to do it. It just saves resources
I think this is a good approach & you can definitely write small programmes that solve low hanging fruit for others rather than yourself.
The trouble the hypothetical dev in the article has is that they're searching in the wrong place — the 'solution domain' (Rust mailing list) rather than the problem domain.
I think if you want good project ideas, go to any random problem domain e.g. find a woodworkers mailing list, say & ask — "what small little programme could I write that would help you when starting projects".
Then, because you've just learned Rust, programme it in Rust. But the people you're developing it for neither need to know or care what language it's in.
If you go to the Rust mailing list to ask for project ideas then you're going to either get non-real-world sample projects (build a calculator), or you're likely to get something that's a problem for Rust devs, which is likely over your head as a beginner.
I believe there is a way to accomplish this without seeking input from people on Reddit or message boards for new domains to contribute to.
There are lists on Github that curate libraries native to a particular programming language. For example, there is a list for Lua (https://github.com/LewisJEllis/awesome-lua) and another for Python (https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python). Explore these lists to identify areas that may require assistance. Some of these lists have not been updated for years, so it is worthwhile to conduct additional research on the domain before undertaking a project.
I have personally completed a project using this approach, although I did have some background knowledge in that domain.
