I mean, I've written lots of software that's "meaningful" according to your definition, but is still not impactful beyond a limited scope. For instance, I've wr

I mean, I've written lots of software that's "meaningful" according to your definition, but is still not impactful beyond a limited scope. For instance, I've written code that helps borrowers manage their student loan accounts from a major loan servicer (about ~8 million users). I've written ERP software, help desk ticket management, proposal management software, HR compensation analysis, IoT security, banking account management, and all kinds of other things. I started learning how computers work back in the 80s/90s because we were poor and I had to hack my computers to work with the games I wanted to play. So I'm running Doom on a POS 386 and have to hack/tweak everything from DOS to the modem init string when playing over TCP/IP. I had started to learn batch scripting and some QBASIC around that time as well. I learned QBASIC because I wanted to create my own "snake" game and eventually my own RPG. When I was around 10, I went to "bring your kid to work" day for a friend of my dad. He was a programmer who wrote C/C++. He gave me a copy of Borland Visual C++ and a book. I started learning what I could but it was silly console stuff. Eventually the web came out with HTML and Javascript v1 and I started creating my own web pages for myself and for random businesses like my local church and some friends. By the time I was 16 I got a kick-ass job programming and doing IT stuff for the American Military University, coding in Visual Basic, Visual C++, Java, and other random stuff. Skipped college because I got an offer from a major defense contractor making great money for a 18 year old. Now I'm on track to be CTO within a division at a major company (I'm 40 years old).