What does "doing great work" mean to you?

It means the person using what you built forgets that someone built it.

The best software I've written disappears. When a therapist records a discrete trial on Tiny Thoughts in under five seconds and moves on to the next one without thinking about the interface, that's great work. The auto-confirm ring, the keyboard shortcuts, the sub-five-second interaction design, all invisible. She's not thinking about my code. She's thinking about the child.

Great work is also honest work. Software that does exactly what it claims and nothing else. No dark patterns. No data collection I didn't tell you about. No features designed to create dependency. When I built TinyToes Auditor to run AI entirely in the browser via WebGPU, that was a deliberate decision. Zero PHI leaves the device. Zero cloud calls. Zero analytics. The software exists to validate PDFs, and that's all it does. No tricks.

More broadly, outside of code, doing great work means doing something that didn't need to be done, and making the world slightly better for it existing. Not all work qualifies. I've thought about this honestly. Some work is just elegant coping with problems that shouldn't exist. The work I want to do, the work I consider great, is work that would still matter even if the systems around it were rebuilt from scratch.