Apart from the headline and a parenthetical reference, there isn't really any insight here about why returning to coding almost crushed him, which would have be

Apart from the headline and a parenthetical reference, there isn't really any insight here about why returning to coding almost crushed him, which would have been more interesting than yet another list of things common in modern development. I have a similar switches between management and occasional development and there are a lot of "interesting" and frustrating challenges in returning to coding after a break of several years. Hearing other people's experiences helps dealing with the frustrations. There is a lot of tooling, frameworks, build processes, etc... which weren't widespread a decade ago which make starting a side project or jumping into code only occasionally an obstacle course for those who do not do it regularly. I'm ever grateful to those who write good how to guides for these things that I can refer to when I miss a crucial step in my setup.