100% that.

Especially that working software over comprehensive documentation part, which can be automated so easily if done right.

There’s so much value in TDD and providing a way to do integration and automated UI tests early on in a project, yet none of the companies I’ve worked at made use of it.

Also automated documentation tools like Swagger are almost criminally underutilised.

Like many others already said. Being self taught is ok, but employers need at least some kind of confirmation about your skills. So getting some kind of officisl certificate will make your job search a lot easier.

Microsoft offers a bunch of .NET certificates if you do their C# courses for example. You can also become a certified Linux professional.

Find something that interests you and then start learning by doing some tutorials. The most important thing is that you have fun and won’t burn yourself out working in a field you don’t enjoy.

Where I’m from there’s demand for Web Devs, Java devs, .NET devs, It Support, Network Engineers, Embedded systems, whatever.

Ha! I’m partially looking at this issue in my bachelor’s thesis.

It’s not at all necessary to embed a browser, but it’s really easy to transfer your web app to a “near native” experience with stuff like electron, ionic, cordova, react native or whatever other web stuff is out there. The issue is mostly that native APIs are complicated and relying on web views or just providing your own “browser” is a relatively easy approach.

Stuff like Flutter, Xamarin or .NET MAUI compile depending on the platform to native or are interpreted by a runtime. There’s a study I use that compares Flutter to React Native, native Java and Ionic on Android and finds that unsurprisingly the native implementation is best, but is closely followed by Flutter (with a few hiccups), with the remainder being significantly slower.

The thing is. I don’t think these compiled frameworks lag behind in any way. But when you have a dev team, that’s competent in web development, you won’t make them learn C#, Xaml, Dart or C++, just to get native API access - you’ll just let a framework handle that for you because it’s cheaper and easier.

Edit: To add some further reading. This paper and this one explore the different approaches out there and suggest which one might be “the best”. I don’t feel like they’re good papers, but there’s almost no other write up of cross-platform dev approaches out there.

Edit2: I also believe that the approach “we are web devs that want access to native APIs” may be turned around in the future, since Flutter and now also .NET offer ways to deploy cross-platforn apps as web apps. I’ll get back to writing the thesis now and stop editing.

Totally agree, I don’t want to have to do research before or during playing and have to consult a build guide for every level up, just so I don’t mess up my character.

Just let me fuck around, find out and do it better all over again in my own time.