I am a very occasional programmer. I maintain several different projects for my business; sometimes not working on them for six months or a year.

I've learned to actively loathe getting started on a new feature for one of my sites. The typical process starts by trying to make a simple change to the codebase, only to learn that some tool needs updating (who knows why), but only after digging around for half an hour trying to figure out why something simple doesn't work. I then try to update the tool, but the update doesn't work, because something else has changed on my dev machine, making the update incompatible. After trying to update everything for a couple of hours, I sometimes manage to get the development environment working again, at which time I actually start coding. Sometimes I just give up and try again in a couple of months.

In the good old days, I would just open a code editor and edit a PHP file, then upload via FTP.

If only it were that simple now. My ideal developer experience would be to simply be able to open my computer and start coding – even if I hadn't worked on a project in a few years.