So I've been programming my own stuff off and on for ten years, but also went through and had to withdraw from a phd plus had a lot of life stuff knock my confidence while still unemployed. I'm currently still brushing up on my maths and a bunch of other stuff since I would like to get into academia but that's besides the point.

Basically, I don't care about webdev enough to do anything much, and things like network programming and more data science type stuff like sql while they seem very useful for getting a job also don't have any of the immediate use as someone who's unemployed and gets limited social contact, so I've had no motivation for that either.

I'm just very focused on what I can do well, so did a tonne of C/C++ programming, studied from the audio programming book to do C audio projects and a website/book for learning opengl graphics in C++. But I never got motivation to make it fit for a portfolio to put online somewhere.

Things I've made:

-The first project I ever did that was particularly useful was optional programming coursework which contributed to my error-correcting codes module during a cryptography masters, although I stupidly lost the code - I think it was supposed to apply Huffman encoding with a binary message we got on turnitin and got 100% marks so that was nice.

-For audio I've made stuff based on following the book for 500 pages so reading/writing audio using portsf and portaudio in C, for specific frequencies, attack and decay shapes for the envelope, converting between sample types and sometimes accounting for stuff like endianness, and in the end because I wanted to make something bigger I combined a lot of the examples it gave into a library which takes a breakpoint file with MIDI/frequencies in Hz, choosing between sawtooth, square and sine waves etc with amplitudes in decibels or 0-1 range, you get the idea, and writes an audio file from it.

-For graphics with opengl I followed the website and made lots of containers, different texture stuff, the shaders for it, got through the detailed chapters on lighting and used diffuse/specular/ambient lighting with more examples, and for my own messing around purposes I wrote a program which randomly generates a surface in 3D space from randomly chosen partial derivatives which it renders a triangulated version of with lighting and moves around with camera controls(WASD keys plus rotating with the cursor like the other examples). Needs a lot of fine tuning though since the camera movement which looks fine for the website tutorial examples isn't adapted to move around the surface and might have other bugs. I also made a scrabble board in 2D for fun, it plays a full game with another player and doesn't have any of the single player ideas I had implemented.

-For the PhD I was supposed to finish a tuning system which I was working on with a MIDI keyboard, I'm thinking of buying one now and getting back into doing some audio stuff using that.

-I also just started applying some of the audio analysis stuff I've been studying for a research MSc which fell through, got it to print out lines of the different frequencies it picks up as minima for the autocorrelation function for an input audio file while playing through the default output device, using portaudio and portsf to read wav files. Am thinking of combining this with the graphics to try and play a wav file while having some colour changing lamp graphics to show the frequencies of ranked minima from the ACF while it plays, but I've been procrastinating because I'm new to a lot of issues with mutithreading and really need to study so it'll do the job despite opengl requiring a lot more of the processing time.

Since job applications give you so little information on whether you're failing to make anything you've done interesting or relevant to them, and obviously there aren't many jobs where I'd even talk about this, I just want to know if it's interesting at all to other programmers...? Like what SHOULD I be making, without just giving up on my interests being relevant to anyone in any profession I'd actually like? To be fair I have a friend who's really insistent he will be able to pay me to work on some robotics stuff he does and write some code for things like displaying and playing messages based on sensor input, but I'm kind of low in confidence that I'm what he's looking for(until he gives details I feel there's no point in worrying since I don't know what sorts of libraries the components use or basically anything, I was just more confident originally because I've messed around with some electronics code but it was tutorial stuff).

I'm also just curious if anyone else is in a sort of inbetween stage where they feel like they should be able to make something professional but get too overwhelmed to actually do it. As far as shipping code goes I can write makefiles and stuff but I haven't really done any of the other steps to make it look like a non beginner project. And finding where to learn this stuff gets overwhelming too.