Pico 2 W as a first board, or am I overthinking it?

I started with the plain Pico 2 and honestly the wireless question turned out to matter less than I expected. My first real project was a soil moisture thing for a tomato pot on the kitchen counter, and it never needed a network connection at all. I did get round to adding a web dashboard months later, and by then I just ordered the W version for a couple of quid more. Having it sit there unused whould have made no difference to whether I finished, what made me finish was the project being small enough to actually do in two evenings.

On the language side, I came from a bit of Python at work so MicroPython was the obvious pick for me. The REPL over USB where you can type a line and see the LED respond instantly is what kept me going in those first frustrating weeks with the breadboard. I tried the C route for about a weekend out of curiosity and it felt like going back to work, so I dropped it. Plenty of people in my office who came from C backgrounds went the other way and were happy, so I think it mostly follows whatever you alredy know. If I did it again I would still buy the cheap board first, but only because I knew I had a Python background. The money difference is so small that if the wireless version is what makes you excited to open the box on day one, that is worth more than any feature list.

For me the wireless bit was the whole reason I stuck with it. I bought a Pico W during a slow stretch at work thinking I'd do the usual blinky stuff first, and honestly I got bored of that within a week. What acutally pulled me back to the desk night after night was a little project where the board served a tiny page showing the temperature in my garage. Nothing fancy, just a browser tab I could check from the sofa, but seeing data from a real sensor over my own wifi felt completely different from an LED. So my take is the opposite of waiting until a project needs it. If your motivation is web-connected gadgets, put the network in front of you early, because that's the hook that keeps evenings interesting.

On language: I came from Python at work and MicroPython felt natural within a couple of evenings. I tried C for a bit out of curiosity and respected it, but the edit-save-run loop in MicroPython is so fast that I never looked back. The people who love C seem to mostly come from an embedded background already, which you don't have. One honest warning though: wireless projects have more failure points. When your little web page doesn't load, you can't tell if it's the board, the router, or your code, and that frustrated me more than anything else early on.

Coming from backend work you might actually like the middle path: MicroPython first, then drop into the C SDK once you want interrupts and tighter timing. That is how I did it. I look after around 30 Raspberry Pis at a community makerspace and we teach beginners on MicroPython precisely because the feedback loop is instant, but a few of us keep a second board flashed with C for anything timing sensitive.

One warning on the wireless side from expirience: networking bugs will eat your evenings. When my garage sensor kept dropping its connection it turned out the wall between them was the problem, nothing to do with my code. Keep your first couple of projects offline, then treat wifi as project three.

One thing I would add from my own first months with a Pico is to pick up a second cheap board or a debug probe and learn the SWD debugging route early, because single-stepping MicroPython scripts that talk to sensors saved me from days of guessing. Also, somewhat pedantically, be careful where you mount the W variant, since the antenna sits at the board edge and stuffing it under a metal breadboard or inside a steel case noticeably wrecks the signal range.

Update: went with the Pico 2 W and started in MicroPython, taking the makerspace person's advice to drop to the C SDK later if I need it. Ordered a cheap debug probe too, since the SWD tip about single-stepping sensor code sounded too useful to skip. Wireless is staying, my first project is a little weather logger that posts to a web page, so it's already earning its keep.