One thing that was a huge breakthrough for me was remote work. It really relieved various issues for me related to dysphoria and personal comfort.

The ability to work remotely also allowed me to move to a state that has a much better record with LGBTQ+ protections without affecting my employment.

Working from the network share - I’ve worked on a project like this before, it was awful for developer experience. It took seconds to run a git status, it was so slow. Occasionally git would lock itself out of being able to update files, since the network read/write times were so slow. Large merges were impossible.

The reason it was set up like this was that the CEO had the network share we were working off of set up to serve to a subdomain (so like, Bob’s work would be at bob.example.com), and it would update live as most hot-reloads will do. He wanted to be able to spy on developers and see what they were doing at any given time.

I have a lot of programming horror stories from that job. The title of this thread brought up a lot of repressed memories.

The most difficult part so far has been finding communities and joining them.

1. It’s difficult to search for communities that aren’t on your home instance.
2. If you go to a big instance and search for communities there, you can’t directly join them, but have to go back to your home instance and paste something into a specific field, then click “next” since the community is never the first result, then click on the community to load it up in your home instance and THEN join it.
3. Communities are fractured across instances - I found at least five different serves with a “cat” / “cats” communities, and there’s no way to aggregate these, and it’s difficult to search out the rest of the cat content without just going to the other instance servers one-by-one and doing it manually