Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now:
* Privacy online
* Google search for niche or exact matches
* Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet
* Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive
* SEO before it got hacked to hell
* Barrier to entry for creatives to build things on the web (for all the flaws flash had, it bridged the gap)
* Finding real discussion and information. The growth of bots posting, misinformation, blogspam, and toxic echo chamber partisan discussion online (maybe it was always like this, i.e, eternal September?)
* MacBooks being easier to upgrade before when things weren't soldered on
* In general anti right to repair hardware
* Not having to worry about dongles, i.e. connecting USB devices to your machine
* Ransomware wasn't a thing. Nothing like a non-technical user needing to learn BTC or XMR to maybe get their data back
* Being able to buy software once vs a subscription, e.g., photoshop
* Work was easier to disambiguate from life before chat apps like Slack made employees always reachable
* CGNAT not being as common
* OAuth is still annoying to implement
* Blocking ads was easier
* Getting a job was easier for a lot of people prior to whiteboarding, leetcode tests, assignments, multi-day interviews and trials, etc. becoming more common
* GDPR making infra+dev work harder because big tech companies don't understand consent and couldn't behave, also leading to performative/annoying cookie banners we see everywhere
* Needing an internet connection for software+tools that used to be able to run locally on your OS
* Website responsiveness was easier before all the devices and monitors with different viewports
* Archival (or scraping) was easier before the majority of human generated content was placed behind login walls (fb) and rendered content needing headless browsers
Edit: Call me cynical if you want—yeah some of those programmer things listed are easier now, but improvements on the core regressions I listed would help programmers (and non-programmers!) all across the world and in developing countries more than some niche highly paid SV engineers using terraform to orchestrate infra on GCP.
* Privacy online
* Google search for niche or exact matches
* Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet
* Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive
* SEO before it got hacked to hell
* Barrier to entry for creatives to build things on the web (for all the flaws flash had, it bridged the gap)
* Finding real discussion and information. The growth of bots posting, misinformation, blogspam, and toxic echo chamber partisan discussion online (maybe it was always like this, i.e, eternal September?)
* MacBooks being easier to upgrade before when things weren't soldered on
* In general anti right to repair hardware
* Not having to worry about dongles, i.e. connecting USB devices to your machine
* Ransomware wasn't a thing. Nothing like a non-technical user needing to learn BTC or XMR to maybe get their data back
* Being able to buy software once vs a subscription, e.g., photoshop
* Work was easier to disambiguate from life before chat apps like Slack made employees always reachable
* CGNAT not being as common
* OAuth is still annoying to implement
* Blocking ads was easier
* Getting a job was easier for a lot of people prior to whiteboarding, leetcode tests, assignments, multi-day interviews and trials, etc. becoming more common
* GDPR making infra+dev work harder because big tech companies don't understand consent and couldn't behave, also leading to performative/annoying cookie banners we see everywhere
* Needing an internet connection for software+tools that used to be able to run locally on your OS
* Website responsiveness was easier before all the devices and monitors with different viewports
* Archival (or scraping) was easier before the majority of human generated content was placed behind login walls (fb) and rendered content needing headless browsers
Edit: Call me cynical if you want—yeah some of those programmer things listed are easier now, but improvements on the core regressions I listed would help programmers (and non-programmers!) all across the world and in developing countries more than some niche highly paid SV engineers using terraform to orchestrate infra on GCP.