Oh yeah, I really wish I had played on a higher difficulty for this reason. Especially because one of the most immersive and thematically cool parts of the game for me was the main story section near the end of act 1 where you have to make a blade oil to fight a >!werewolf!< . (Vague wording to minimise spoilers in my main comment.) I really liked this because it made me reflect on what it means to be a Witcher — how the knowledge might be more important than the mutations and the magic.
An additional point to the prepping is that being open-world means that you can potentially go to areas or take on challenges far beyond the “intended” level. On lower difficulties, I didn’t feel sufficiently punished for being audacious in that way, and I think the potential for punishment is part of the fun of the audacity. Especially when getting destroyed like this isn’t the game “fuck you for even trying”, but rather a “try exploring some more, find some new recipes and come back later (or just read the bestiary and find out that you already have the item you need)”
Congrats! I appreciate this post because I want to be where you are in the not too distant future.
Contributing to Open Source can feel overwhelming, especially if working outside of one’s primary field. Personally, I’m a scientist who got interested in open source via my academic interest in open science (such as the FAIR principles for scientific data management and stewardship, which are that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). This got me interested in how scientists share code, which led me to the horrifying realisation that I was a better programmer than many of my peers (and I was mediocre)
Studying open source has been useful for seeing how big projects are managed, and I have been meaning to find a way to contribute (because as you show, programming skills aren’t the only way to do that). It’s cool to see posts like yours because it kicks my ass into gear a little.