statusanxiety

I have recently started writing a web scraping bot to learn Selenium and have found that the problems that are truly stumping me are things related to the underlying systems of my computer. For instance, I didn't understand why Selenium was bringing up an import error when I'd definitely installed it. I later found I was using the wrong interpreter in vscode. I'm currently completely stuck on setting up a remote debugging port because I am having issues that I can't find answers for online and have no idea how to debug myself (my localhost won't connect on any browser).

How do I best go about solving problems that are not necessarily "coding" problems, but more related to setting up my system correctly for my code to work? How do I go about finding out what is necessary to learn and what I can ignore?

I'm 23 years old and have half a year left of my bachelor of Arts degree. I've been learning web design and python for the last 6 - 7 months and I'm enjoying it, but am worried that I've missed the boat on coding (too far behind at my age / the market for programmers is getting oversaturated).

My ultimate goal is to work at (or potentially found) a company working to address climate change and transition to a greener economy. I'm really interested in synthetic biology as a pathway to this and thinking about doing a master's in biomedical or biochemical engineering.

My question is what skills do you think will take me the most upstream for my goals? What skills open the most doors?

I like programming because it actually allows me to build my ideas. Is programming and biology a good combination? Is programming worth pursuing? If so, what area of programming should I focus in on?

Are there skills that I'm overlooking?