Look around your town and try a few regular local group activities. See "third place" for ideas. Be patient with yourself. This will take time, and that's okay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

Some of my most durable adult friendships started at group ballroom dance classes. The studio was a 15-minute drive from my suburban home, twice per week, and focused on social dancing, not competitive. I don't think dancing was the thing that made it work, but funny teachers and regular faces. That studio closed (pre-pandemic, thank goodness). No studio since has recreated the magic, but other activities have.

When a cross-cutting team is responsible for something, it's no longer the product team's problem: Architecture, infrastructure, CI/CD, QA, load testing, security...

Welcome to the club. I registered my own domain and moved my digital life off Google services 18 years ago for this exact reason. If you need another reason: They scan all of your e-mail to target ads at you and your associates. Do it. It's not that difficult!

My "new" mail provider fetches messages from Gmail to create a unified inbox, which helped with the transition. Today, I'm thinking of shutting this off given the volume of misaddressed e-mail and spam that arrives via Gmail.

It boggles my mind that they need a photo ID to prove that my 9-year-old account with a saved credit card belongs to an adult. The linked Steam account is 18 years old.

If you want to compare Redis and PostgreSQL as a cache, be sure to measure an unlogged table, as suggested in the article. Much of the slowness of PostgreSQL is to ensure durability and consistency after a crash. If that isn't a concern, disable it. Unlogged tables are automatically truncated after a crash.