This is an excellent break down of OP's situation, which seems very common in tech.

> make it known

This was the hardest "part" of working in a company for me to understand and execute on, especially when reporting to a non-technical supervisor. The thing is they simply don't know where to look or what to lookout for to give us accolades. It isn't as hard as we make it out to be, either. It can be as simple as "I made the common components for the WidgetMaker uniform through out the system, increasing reliability and improving maintainability. This will help us avoid an outage during peak WidgetMaking season so we can continue to make Widgets and operate smoothly", which isn't at all horn-tooty, but gives credit where due.