Like helping to find a bug, discussing about how to setup an application for a certain use case or anything like that? Answering questions on Stack overflow is an example but is that the best way?

Generally the best way to help out is to do a thing that’s needed and that you can figure out how to do. Your list includes a bunch of good options, and I’ve been thanked for doing all those things at one point or another. Some common growth paths include:

1. Using the software
2. Encountering bugs, problems, or small opportunities for improvement.
3. Discussing those informally in forums and helping people find workarounds.
4. Identifying some of those issues as common things other things experience as well, so filing bugs for them with clear explanations and links to related forum discussions.
5. Reading source code to better understand bugs.
6. Discussing potential fixes in developer bug threads (or in GitHub or whatever).
7. Submitting small fixes for simple bugs as pull requests.

Another path might be:

1. Using the software and reading forums/docs for help.
2. Answering basic questions on forums, looking to old threads and relevant docs.
3. Learning about common questions.
4. Writing blogs or forum posts about common questions.
5. Submitting improvements to official docs to clarify common areas of confusion.

There are other paths as well, the main thing is to use a thing so you learn about it and then use that knowledge to make it a little easier for the next person. Good luck!

I don’t think titles directly transfer between companies, and yet the industry allows it. It’s a very useful tool for advancement.

This may be true on some corners of the industry, but at the more competitive end (both in terms of competitive pay, and a competitive pool of candidates)… I believe it’s common to relevel on hire. I’ve seen folks go from director to senior and from senior to junior at my org. The candidates being offered those seemingly big “demotions” often seem to be somewhere between unphased and enthusiastic about the change, presumably because the compensation package we offer at the lower level beats what they were getting with an inflated title and because they know their inflated title is nonsense and they’re frustrated with the other aspects of organizational dysfunction that accompany title inflation at their current company.

What you say is real, and sometimes a promotion in one org can help bridge you into an org that would have been hard to get hired into as a junior, or harder to get promoted in. It’s not without risk though. All things being equal, I’d much rather spend my time working on a strong team and learning a lot and being challenged than to be in a weaker org that’s handing out inflated titles. Getting gud isn’t a guarantee of advancement, but it’s at least as reliable over the long haul as title inflation.

I’m mostly in the pro-written word camp myself, but I have sought out video tutorials in cases where written docs seem to assume something I don’t know. When I’m learning something new, a written doc might have a 3-word throwaway clause like “… add a user and then…”. But I’ve never added a user and don’t know how. If it’s niche open-source software with a small dev team, this may not be covered in the docs either. I’ll go fishing for videos and just seeing that they go to a web-ui or config-file or whatever sets me on the path to figure out the rest myself.

That is to say, video content that shows someone doing a thing successfully often includes unspoken visual information that the author doesn’t necessarily value or even realize is being communicated. But the need to do the thing successfully on-screen involves documenting many small/easy factoids that can easily trip someone inexperienced up for hours.

I’m as annoyed as anyone when I want reference material and find only videos, and I generally prefer written tutorials as well. But sometimes a video tutorial is the thing that gets me oriented enough to understand the written worthy I wasn’t ready to process previously.

Edit: The ubiquity of video material probably has little to do with it’s usefulness though, and everything to do with how easy it is to monetize on YouTube.

I read the design notes and found them pretty interesting even though I haven’t really been pining for a faster linker: https://github.com/rui314/mold/blob/main/docs/design.md

I’m struggling with overly confident players.

Why do you say they’re overconfident? Are they consistently winning fights without an opportunity cost? If so, then I would say their confidence is well placed. The fact that you jumped straight from overconfidence to character death suggests to me that you may be missing a more progressive range of costs and therefore haven’t been giving them any reasons to consider alternative solutions.

• Are enemies one-dimensional? Can the players imagine interacting with them in ways other than fighting? A powerful noble they suspect but cannot prove is breaking the law is a different kind of enemy than a slavering beast. One can easily imagine the downsides of walking into the nobles manor and slicing them in half.
• Do enemies have value beyond the loot on their corpse? Information is a common prize to dangle, find a way to talk to them (perhaps still after non-lethal combat) to gain some critical insight. Bounties for capture alive can spark some out of the box thinking, as can humanizing some enemies and introducing allies who advocate for negotiation and reform over eradication… the value of a non-lethal approach may be the favor of a powerful ally.
• Does time matter? Resting 10m to recover lost HP in the middle of a chase has consequences for the chase. Maybe we have more important things to do than murder every passerby when we’re on the clock.
• Collateral damage? Force a fight on home turf on the enemies terms. Victory could have a serious cost when the fight has been brought to you.
• Do you employ loss without death? A training-wheels consequence of underestimating danger is capture or loss of gear. There are lots of ways for a fight to go wrong that don’t result in character death.
• Do you give rewards for non-combat solutions? Ensure that solving problems outside combat earns XP/loot on par with the violent approach unless it’s a rare quest with a theme of selflessness.

Finally, consider just telling them that a fight would be dangerous and could result in death. We forget that the characters are seasoned adventurers and the players may not be. If the players lack an accurate intuition for the difficulty of a fight, let them know that their characters can judge the danger more accurately and fill them in. I did this without even a hint of an in-world justification with a first over-leveled dragon fight in a previous D&D campaign, warning the players directly that it wasn’t a fair fight and they would likely pay a serious price for rolling the dice an hoping their numbers were bigger. Because they were new players and this situation was unprecedented in their experience, I went so far as to run a round of combat in a vision-sequence to drive home how much devastation they were in for in a straight fight and then woke them up from the vision with no real world consequence for the combat other than maybe some exhaustion.This really changed their mindset and they began gathering intel and negotiating and planning how to tip the odds back in their favor through skullduggery.

In any case, I’d encourage to ask thoughtfully whether their confidence is genuinely misplaced or if you’d telegraphed to them that success is inevitable. If so, talk to them directly about a change in danger level, and start telegraphing it in multiple ways so they can see when other paths are available or advisable.

I think it was a good learning opportunity for the players that you need to be tactical and work together in PF2e, since they basically just all tried to attack the rat in melee. It also shows the value of having support characters in the party.

This feels like the crux of it to me. A string of melee attacks is frequently not the optimal path. If you feel like everyone learned good lessons, moving on with replacement characters seems totally reasonable. But another approach if folks are still feeling confused about the encounter might be to rerun it outside the campaign canon just as a wargame. I wouldn’t do this frequently, but when learning a system that demands tactical acumen, it can be helpful:

• Reveal the full stat block of the monster so people can all discuss its strengths and weaknesses (OOC, as players trying to “win the game” rather than as characters in-world… this is not usually the way to maximally enjoy a TTRPG, but it can be a useful learning technique when engaging with an rpg that has significant tactical/wargaming elements you’re struggling with).
• Look at the success/failure thresholds for various melee and spell attacks to see what is likely to work well.
• Look at saves and resistances. Were there unexploited weaknesses the party could have employed?
• Think about action economy and action denial. Were there actions and abilities the characters could have used to deny actions to the boss that are more important than the actions spent on the denial.
• I know this isn’t a party with a lot of traditional support characters, but did they sleep on abilities that provide buffs or debuffs? Everyone has access to flatfooted via flanking and most classes have access to some kind of buff/debuff abilities.
• Talk about recall knowledge, how it’s the in-game mechanism that turns actions into tactical knowledge of strengths and weaknesses. Tell them how you plan to run recall knowledge as a GM, what they can expect to gain from it and what the risks of failure are. It’s an essential tool in the game, but one of the rare areas that’s underspecified in the ruleset and leaves room to be interpreted in much more useful or much less useful ways. If this is a crew that struggles with hidden info and is just not knowing how to get started analyzing an encounter with a monster they don’t know much about, consider temporary house rules around recall knowledge that are “broken” balance-wise to help them get their feet under them faster. Offer a free successful recall knowledge at the start of a spooky combat. Or offer to roll recall knowledge in the open and to give no info rather than incorrect info on critical failure (not raw, if I recall correctly). Do these things for 3 or so sessions and then re-evaluate whether they’re still necessary. A very strong recall knowledge could certainly be abused by players with strong tactical analysis skills, but it may be just what weaker players need to strengthen up to do the basic tactics assumed in pf2e balance.
• Try the encounter with a couple different party comps. Can the original comp do better when played optimally? Or is the thing that pushes you toward success fixing the party comps to open up more options. Avoid over-optimizing party comp on one monster though. You want to be able to target a variety of weaknesses whether that is low ac, some particular bad save, denying big impactful actions, or buff stacking.
• Take note of key improbable dice rolls as well. If some big ability or spell gets wasted against the odds, that’s bad luck and it happens. It might still represent optimal play even if it doesn’t work out.
• You can do some of this wargaming alone as well if you want, and can relay your lessons learned to the party. But a wargaming one-shot with everyone might let everyone explore a bunch of ideas quickly and share their lessons learned.
• When you stop learning from a combat, feel free to stop it early and try a different config rather than rolling it out to the bitter end for no reason.

However you proceed, happy gaming.