I think we all change as we grow older and gain more experience. I know I look back and cringe at things I have done or said in the past. Times change and people change. What we once thought of as perfectly fine behavior 10-30 years ago may not be today. He seems like a smart guy :) He said he has looked at himself in the mirror and seen things he would like to change. It seems like something we could all stand to do once in a while.

Is Digital Ocean a wrapper on AWS/Azure? It seems like DO offers plain VMs that you can use for whatever you need. In that respect it seems more similar to AWS and Azure than Heroku. It provides you the infrastructure to run your apps. The way you deploy and manage them is up to you. Heroku in my experience abstracts things further so that you don't spin up your own VM. Instead you use Heroku's UI and tools to install applications and use Heroku's resources. Heroku attempts to help developers focus on apps instead of infrastructure. From what I understand you could build something like Heroku on Digital Ocean. I may be mistaken though. I'm not an expert in Digital Ocean so I am not sure if they offer a platform-like experience similar to Heroku.

Mine are: C# GitLens Go Python SQL Server (mssql) Angular Language Service VSCode-icons

Those are pretty good. I like the space themes. Congratulations to the winners.

Two paid products that I've been happy to pay for have been Affinity Photo and Affinity Design. They have freed me from Adobe. I also pay for other graphic design products like Mischief and some pixel art tools like Pixel Art Studio. I also supported Krita and Paint.net. I don't buy any editors/IDEs anymore. The free options are great for what I do.

I think dotnetcore is pretty great right now. 2.1.3 is LTS and a new 2.2 preview is out. I would agree that 1.0 to 2.0 was rough, but 2.0 to 2.1 was a breeze and I don't have any issues using it. Of course everyone has to evaluate what will work for them. I'd be more worried if it stopped changing. With the way things change so fast I hope dotnetcore will change and adapt to stay competitive with other frameworks.

That's a variety of topics. Any reasoning behind the 4 choices? PHP and asp.net are somewhat similar but Android and SEO go off in different directions.

I prefer non proprietary scripting languages but it does not really bother me if a game engine uses its own language as long as they have good docs and examples.

Is Atomic still going on? I have not used Atomic, but I have used Godot. I think Godot is a great game engine. They recently added C# support as well. Other game frameworks and engines that I like (I only work on 2D games): MonoGame with Nez or Mono.Extended Phaser.js Love2D

Kudos to you and your co-workers for attempting something constructive rather than roll over or quit. Personally I would have just made a separate account and gave them the password to that so as not to make waves. I'm impressed that you stood up to better your situation because I probably would not have. Also it's is great your management was open. I can't imagine the logic behind asking for passwords but I'm glad to read that your management is going to change their password control policy.