None of the above.
I’m an ex-ASP developer (1994-2001) who’s been driving semis for 15 years and wanting to transition back to web dev.
Not a CompSci student. (Went to college for Chiropractic Medicine. Dropped out after 1 year w a 3.9gpa because I wanted to get married, but I couldn’t be married while attending college.)
I know several classic, unused languages. I don’t know too many folks hiring VBScript coders.
As for WHY unit testing… Test Driven Development (TDD). Write your tests BEFORE you write your code.
My major portfolio project is a Yard Management System targeting my current employer which has none. It will also require websockets to keep all users synchronized, but that looks fairly simple.
While chance of sale to them is very low (skin flints), it’d still look awesome on my portfolio site along w recreations of my legacy projects, ported to php instead of their original ASP/ SQLServer on corporate Intranets.
That was part of the doom of my earlier career: no portfolio. My projects were always behind firewalls, on intranets, unviewable to the public. So long as those companies and departments existed, new employers could talk about it w them and confirm my resume was true.
Then in 2001, NASDAQ crashed. The Twin Towers meant little to me. NASDAQ hurt more.
Within 2 weeks, every contract company I had ever worked for, every IT dept I ever worked w, every manager who ever knew me, disappeared and every future contract dried up. I could barely get interviews. I would code circles around my competition (literally half the code written [25 vs 54] lines in half the time [20 vs 49 min]), but he got the job w an existing Internet site while my resume was unprovable. Final straw: ordering my mocha at the local coffee shop from my former project manager. She had fallen from $300k/yr salary to tips.
Still had wife and kids to feed.
Paid training to drive a truck and swing hammers in the oil field for the next 10 years of my life.