My father started his career as a software engineer in the 1970s. He worked at places like Raytheon and DEC and a few others. He started his career using punchcards, and ended his career building websites from a laptop. I am grateful that from a very young age he let me ask about and use anything he had in his home office, starting with a kit computer in the late 1970s which I learned BASIC on.
My father died in 2011. I flew back home to be with my mother during that time. It was a really hard time, made much harder because my only son was one month old, and my father never got to meet him.
In that week at home, my mother asked me to go through my father's computers and help her figure out if there was anything she should know about or do anything with. Going through his computers was a profound experience. I got to see all the projects he was working on; the ones we all knew about because they were his professional projects, the ones I knew about because we always had technical conversations, and the ones no one knew about because they were just little side projects for fun and curiosity.
I spent several days going through his computers, because it was like lingering in one last conversation with him. In the end, there wasn't much to share with my mother, for the reasons the parent comment mentioned - most of the projects had too much personal context for anyone else to pick up. But that experience had a huge impact on me. I realized that if I died that day and someone went through my computer, they'd find all kinds of projects that would never see the light of day. I was a hobbyist programmer at that point, and going through my father's computer motivated me to stop working on so many different hobby projects, and pick one or two to really build out. I realized I had developed meaningful programming skills, and I could probably build something that others would find useful.
Since then I have done that with a number of projects. If I die today, you could still find many little projects that won't ever see the light of day. But you'd also find some highly impactful projects, which I am really proud of. I miss my father every day, but I my life would also be on a very different trajectory if I hadn't learned what I did from his passing.