I really like using LaTeX for writing, both articles and for teaching. I find that it eliminates many of the hassles of using Word. I started trying to figure out how to write my own packages this past year and ran into many problems. One of those problems was figuring out a way to keep the .sty packages in a directory that I could easily access and that would be convenient for my workflow rather than what the LaTeX directory structure enforced.

The LaTeX search path includes two environment variables: TEXMFHOME and TEXMFLOCAL that determine where you would store .sty files to be recognized by LaTeX.¹ If you follow the excellent instructions here, you can use the Linux program kpsewhich to find where those paths are. For me they were at /Users/<USERNAME>/Library/texmf and /Users/<USERNAME>/Library/texmf-local, respectively.

Since I generally have a file structure that I could export to any new computer, I don't want to have to remember to pull files from these directories. I would definitely forget to do this when I changed machines, and would probably only realize my mistake after IT wiped the machine. I want to be able to edit my .sty files in my own directory that would go with me. I realized that a very simple solution would just to have a symbolic link point my TEXMFHOME:²

ln -s ~/work/workflow/texmf /Users/<USERNAME>/Library/texmf

Now I can work and save the files in my own work directory, but LaTeX will recognize the file and use the style.