I appreciate that you took the time to supply the nuances I omitted. While there is value in a positive framing, it’s important to acknowledge potential struggles as well. We can’t effectively tackle issues if we’re not aware of them.

In any case, while I’m not qualified to help you with your difficulties, I hope you find - or have found - a way to work on overcoming them. Dealing with insecurities, from my own experience, can be a tough process, further amplified by setbacks and a lack of perceived progress. But if you persevere, even if you might not feel that you have improved much, you may find yourself looking back at a time when it was worse and, by contrast, see the progress you’ve made. May that hope, that your future self will look back and be proud of your hard work, give you the strength to keep going.

I considered that option too, but opted to go with the more positive guess. I’m not qualified either way, I just wanted to say something nice.

Well, you sound like a team player. You place the common good (fun together) higher than individual ambitions (or maybe place your own worth very low, I can’t tell from one sentence, but the outcome is the same).

Saying deliberately sounds like it’s not just a thing that you find yourself doing again and again, but a conscious choice. That suggests there was a choice to make; that the option of playing a self-centered character was something you were actively aware of, but were sufficiently repulsed by it to make a point of being better than those people.

I think you’re a nice person, empathetic, while not so entirely innocent as to not even consider the possibility, still principled and caring enough to actively defy it.

I think you’re a net good for this world.

If you don’t pay for late checkout, you can’t check out late. If you don’t pay for the DLC, you can’t play the DLC. You can still check out at the normal time (which is the basic service) or play the base game, respectively.

Dammit, EAC may be an issue on Linux though. It’s kinda hit or miss whether a given developer will take the extra steps, particularly given the conflicting sources on just how complex it actually is. According to Valve, it’s a checkbox and dropping a file in your depot. Others claim it would require an Epic Online Services version of EAC, with all the baggage that carries, including potentially rewriting a whole chunk of your code.

It’s like booking a hotel: Basic price will get you a room for the night, with all the common amenities, but if you want late checkout, you’ll pay extra. Sure, they could fold that into the basic price and make it the norm, but if you know you’ll leave early anyway, you’ll be paying for something you don’t want.

The metaphor breaks apart if you look too closely - for hotels, early checkout is a convenience since they can get the room ready sooner for the next guest, so they’ll incentivise that, while the devs have already put in the work. On the other hand, the late checkout is a service of convenience while a DLC is an excitement feature, where the content is instead an incentive to pay more.

Either way, I feel like add-ons for games aren’t too different from add-ons in many other industries: “This is the basic <thing>, with the price we feel we can charge for it. This here is an extra you can have for an extra charge.”

Butterfly gang

Bribe them with snacks. Source: Am IT. Have been bribed with snacks. You can bet that user got priority treatment from that day on.

I’ve twice now gotten a position without prior knowledge of the tools in question. I think a lot is just taking a gamble on your ability to learn as you go - which clearly worked out in your case.

I had my start with Python, albeit as a kid and I didn’t actually understand too much about the principles at the time. Still, I think that was a good place to start learning about the concepts of instructions and variables.

I learned more about the ideas underpinning it all later, and most of my understanding came when actually working in software development on a live and in-development codebase. I think that’s a good progression: start small, then learn some theory just so you’ve heard the terms once, then try to make sense of actual code using that.

Edit: definitely work on some goal though. Don’t code in a vacuum, think of something small you want to achieve and learn to do that.