I agree that complexity is increasing without providing to much benefits. I am no office developer (embedded dev) but I work in a smaller company and when R&D i

I agree that complexity is increasing without providing to much benefits. I am no office developer (embedded dev) but I work in a smaller company and when R&D is paused, chances are that I will work on infamous "internal software", mostly little tools to move data from A to B, present data for review, etc. . Nothing too exiting but I have fun doing it in general. Lately interfacing with any MS app or their respective cloud services isn't feasible anymore. Authentication security theatre where I have to register my app at MS and even describe to them the nature of it to get access to some pretty raw beta graph API whose API key I personally have to hide somewhere isn't worth the hassle anymore. You could undoubtedly do some nice things and it might not be such a problem for someone specialized in the field. But when I visit channels for exchange to certain problems, I more and more just find wastelands. There are few peers for exchange, as if they have all been eaten. If I compare this to MSDN I enjoyed as a kid I have the impression that most devs left already. Maybe there is a magical place where everybody is hiding, but at this point the effort and time needed to even create simple tools is too much and it also affects maintenance. I want these tools to be fire and forget, maintenance aside from the most basic one isn't an option. At some point the garage server seems very enticing. IP blocks are sensible to control access on a network level in my opinion. Easy, yet effective. I maintain some scripts to read some Azure, AWS IPs and put them in the respective matching portals. This is not fun.