Self taught programmer here. If your goal is to contribute code. Get the project’s code, learn how to run it. Go pick an issue, great if it has a first time contributor tag or something. Try to fix it. If someone fixes it before you, now you can compare fixes. Sounds simple? It kind of is, but there are some side quests involved. This processes will force you to learn the bare minimum to get the task done. Your solution will most likely be shit but that’s great, you can only get better. Programming is less about knowing how to do something and more about figuring it out as you go. Google, chatbot/llm, read the docs, ask others. Edit: Forgot something important: Be open to critique, programming is a craft and there is a lot to learn. Being bad at it is a given for most. Also most programmers are kinda bad at communicating so they may sound harsher than they are.

lol

1. No just linux and an orchestrator, for very small and local deployments I have used k3s.
2. Probably not, but maybe with WSL2.
3. Yes, there are many ways to do it. Some have mentioned helm but you cal also write your own manifests, somewhat similar to docker-compose files.
4. The Kubernetes Book, and just try to get some pods up and running.