Got a moisture meter? Check the poplar first, bet it's wet.

Kevin is the real MVP of self taught coding, no joke. Here is the thing nobody brings up though: the bootcamp might still pay off at tax time. If it counts as job training for a new career, that 2 grand can be a work related deduction, and some states even have grants that reimburse part of it. So before you write it off as a total loss, check if you can get some of that money back. The slides were still garbage, but a refund makes the sting a lot smaller.

Went through 16 zones with a tone probe when I first got into the trade. Cheap tracker died on zone 4 and I spent two hours chasing a break that was really just a bad splice in the crawlspace. The probe at least tells you which pair is live before you start guessing. Save the cheap one for when you already know where the problem is.