I find GCP to be easier to use, but that's just me. If you're already productive with AWS I don't think there's much point in trying to get ramped up on Google's PaaS
"week year" was the cause of a big Twitter outage during the time I worked there. In the immediate aftermath there was a "see? this is why we need a monorepo" exhortation from leadership.
My definition of "having fun" while coding is to feel like I'm not struggling to manifest whatever idea it is I have. To that end, right now I find writing for Google Cloud to be fun; it requires almost no backend expertise to stitch products together to make a decently powerful API, which I can easily build a frontend against.
My understanding is that in Japan, engineers generally make a lot less money than they do in the USA, and that American companies with engineering offices in Japan tend to pay better.
In the late 00's, SVN was the dominant version control system, but it had lots of pain points (eg reliant on remote server, lots of crappy little .svn directories, branching was difficult, very difficult to make a git repo for small projects etc) that Git resolved. At this time, hg and bzr were also on the scene, but Github quickly became incredible popular, for a few reasons
- Sourceforce, the incumbent community home for open source, was a comparatively inferior user experience
- Rails, which was a dominant OSS project in that era, was hosted there, and the Rails / Ruby community converged on GH as a result
- Heroku was a trendy platform during this time, which at the time you deployed by `git push`-ing, so git knowledge was required to take advantage of it.
FYI if you set PayPal as your payment method, you can cancel your subscription in a couple clicks. Obviously it'd be preferable to NOT have a ridiculously difficult cancellation process, but that's one way to make it easier.