Man, the light map idea is smart but here's the thing nobody talks about: it changes with the seasons. That motion light on your neighbor's porch might not matter in summer when trees are full of leaves and blocking half the sky, but come November when those leaves drop, suddenly you've got a clear line of sight to every light on the block. Same goes for the sun's path. In winter the sun sets way south of where it does in June, so a streetlight that never touched your frame in July will sit right in the corner of it by December. I keep notes in my phone with dates on them, like "porch light at 412 visible after Oct 15" kind of stuff. Takes a year to build a real map but after that you actually know where to set up instead of guessing every time.

Hauling a laptop stand to 9 countries is wild, I ditched mine after two trips once I saw hostel bins full of them. Just stack books or ask the cafe for a few menus, your neck won't know the difference.

Learned this the hard way too. Back when I was doing freeCodeCamp stuff, I got hit by one of those "you need to declare every variable with var or it'll leak into global scope" joke posts and spent a whole weekend adding var to things that didn't need it. The real killer was when someone told me to always wrap stuff in try/catch "for safety" and my errors got swallowed for two days before I noticed. My advice is to test the advice on a tiny throwaway file first. If you paste in a snippet and it works in a blank JS file, then try it in your real code. Also the browser console is your best friend here, just type it in and see what happens before you commit.