Had a pretty similar relationship. I was the one that wanted to get back together though. But this one time he didn't apologize and did the most incredible 180 on me. Never felt so hated, almost killed myself [0]. I tried to engage once in a while, sometimes he would too. But would never act/talk "normal" again. He found a new bf and talked about how much he loved him just to make me sad [1]. And one day just minutes after insulting me all of a sudden he starts talking like the old him again. Wanted to meet up. Was so happy. He wanted to just hook up tho, not into that, but still I wouldn't outright say know, was very happy to meet him anyways. I tried saying something like "lets go eat something and we'll see what happens", but he snapped and started berating me again. And that was the final end of us, never messaged him again and neither did he.

[0] which what made me start reading about BPD [1] he'd either talk about this or berate me, wouldn't mention anything else, work or anything. We were always super chatty about literally everything so yea

The Twitter thing you bring up is interesting. Tweeting (or posting wherever) about your work is interesting in that it forces you to at least pretend you're getting something done.

I find that most hacks for consistency are external in nature. When you're a lone wolf you can slack off for days and nobody will notice. Say, personally, I'll often miss my own hard deadlines, but I'd never miss an appointment with somebody.

It's all the small things. Till recently there weren't even react devtools for Firefox. Almost any dev-oriented extension targets chrome first. Chrome has a great devtools protocol, and node conveniently happens to support it too, which is also why many node debugging tools will use chrome.

I use Firefox for casual browsing, but all work-y stuff I do in chrome. Sometimes I'll start debugging a site in Firefox and then some behavior is a bit "off" or missing and I just go back to Chrome.

And the only reason I'm using Firefox is because it's not Chrome. I wanted a different browser that looks a bit different to always be aware of the difference between work and personal.

It really is the small things. The one that gets me constantly is that you can't resize the columns in the Network tab.

I appreciate a lot of the stuff Firefox has been doing, but Google was very wise to realise that first class developer support was the winning move.

More interestingly this mechanic functions in every kind of social relationship. Everybody who isn't a total shut-in has at least a few different audiences they cater to. Also very common to become too attached to a persona that, say, pleased one's parents but doesn't quite work out at work and suffer for it. And if anything given the prevalent expectation for consistency, such dissociation is rather freeing.