Those examples I was giving did provide lots of value, to the client. The section from the article was talking about optimizing for visibility. Deep technical problems with lots of value are not always visible, and I think it's fine to build a career around those types of things.

I wasn't disputing what you said, kind of agreeing with it actually. Although as a consultant for over a decade myself I have to make an effort to make sure my work is visible. I'm not sure I could lurk in the shadows with no one seeing the value I create and still get paid :)

Do you actually get most of your work from promoting yourself to strangers via Github or similar?

In my experience, if you do good work, it's usually not that hard to get more work even without a public showcase of your work. Your clients will come back the next time they need to get a job done. Your clients also tell others about you, and word-of-mouth is extremely valuable advertisement.

I guess promoting yourself on Github and on personal blogs is one way to go about it, but real life personal relationships shouldn't be undervalued in my opinion. Most consultants I know have a surprisingly bare website.

Still don’t really understand what your objection here is. As the parent to your comment said: the OP never said don’t do it, they just said don’t stop once the code is checked in and follow up by pointing out the value to others incase it’s not obvious.

I think the question here is whether this value needs to be publicly visible.