Yep. I love finding someone's old project on github and going through it and especially comparing it to stuff they did release and seeing how it was merely a stepping stone and a way for them to learn something. That significantly influenced how I code and helped me to be okay with writing code that never sees the light of day, as long as it helps me get past something in a project that does.

There are those “Awesome *” lists, such as “Awesome Python” or “Awesome Selfhosted”. Those are nice curated lists of repos on GitHub.