You don't really need to be author of a "famous" library. Just having a body of high quality code on display (even if not used by a lot of people), sets you apart from the majority of programmers.
In my experience, few people cares about your open source work unless its something they have heard of. _I_ may care. _You_ may care. But most people don't. I have a "large body of code on display" in my github, but I know for a fact that no one ever looks at it.
